Castrato
by Medorikoi
Summary: Everyone has read the stories. Everyone in this world knows Sherlock Holmes; the eccentric, the genius. A lucky few know his smile, his laughter. No one ever thinks of the man he once was. No one asks what dark secrets forged the man he became.
1. Chapter 1

Title:Castrato  
Rating: NC-17  
Summary: Written for Kinkmeme prompt- Eunuch.  
Everyone has read the stories. Everyone in this world knows Sherlock Holmes; the eccentric, the genius. A lucky few know his smile, his laughter, his great heart. No one ever thinks of the man he once was. No one asks what dark secrets forged the man he became.

* * *

Many of the people who read my stories assumed that after my initial bout of listing my flatmates peculiar characteristics that I stopped the practice. That somehow once we moved from the realm of co borders to friends that my Holmes became comprehensible to me in some way. In truth the more I learn about Holmes the more he becomes a mystery to me.

It took no less than two years of being his intimate companion to not only be introduced to his brother but to become privy to the knowledge that he did not simply appear fully formed on the earth without family, let alone that he had any past to speak of.

Long nights I have spent waiting for Holmes to return when he has decided it was in both our interests for me to stay behind, contemplating the man.

What sort of family could have produced two men such as these? Both astoundingly brilliant in matters of logic but so lacking in the social sphere that I count myself as one of Holmes only friends?

I do know that Holmes, my Holmes that is, attended university. Surely there must have been some time during these years that others approached him in friendship who, if not comparably intelligent to himself, were at least as serviceable as myself.

The most irregular point on my friend however is his utter dismissal of the fairer sex. Never have I met any man less interested in women than he. I am not so naïve as to believe that there are not men who enjoy the company of other men, I am myself an army man and a doctor and know well the deeds that go on in the black of the night. However I cannot find even the slightest indication that he enjoys such activities with anyone or that he even possesses the desire to do so.

Furthermore, Holmes dismissal of women is not only in the realm of desire and love but in all aspects of life with the one or two notable acceptations to disprove the rule, such as our own dear land lady with whom he has grown fond of over continuous forced interaction. It seems at times that he has a deeply ingrained bias in him bred so deeply and influentially in his past that the idea of women as equal is completely incomprehensible to his massive intellect.

All of my reflection and years of apparently inept observation have brought me no closer to unraveling even the smallest mystery of my dearest friend. However, as his biographer and I am proud to say, the one whose company he seeks when more often than not he hides society, I have very recently strayed across new ground, peculiarities I would never have discovered if not for happenstance.

It happened no more than a week ago and I firmly believe that if I was not present at its occurrence that Holmes would have managed to hide his injury without me ever being the wiser.

The case itself was of little consequence and indeed will never find its way into the Strand. But it was not without its dangers, it was in fact nearly the end of Holmes. At times it seems as if Holmes can call upon the very future and know the path of every stray bullet. I myself sometimes have fallen into the habit of believing that no ill can befall him. But luck, no matter how hard we may fight it, is a significant part of the game we play.

This night we were lucky. It was only a graze of a bullet on his thigh, enough to bleed, enough to require medical attention if only my own. An inch higher and it would have been his femoral artery; it would have been his death.

For years Holmes has come to me for every injury and malady, a personal distaste for what he says is the inherent snobbery of those of my profession has made him my most frequent patient. I for my part enjoy taking care of my friend as I know he will never have that same consideration for his own body.

Knowing how very close I had come to losing my dearest friend was very keen to treat the wound he did incur to reassure myself as to his safety. Immediately upon entering our rooms I sought my medical bag and instructed him to disrobe from the waist down.

I realize my request may have sounded uncouth but by this point the blood had saturated the inner length of his pants and my tact seems to be dissipating with the fading color left in his face.

He insisted that he was in fact, fine! That it did not require my assistance in the least! But even as he spoke I could see the pain clouding his normally piercing eyes.

For minutes we fought, raged even, as we tend to do in matters of his ill health.

It never occurred to me that it could be the fear of fully disrobing in front of me that stopped him from getting the attention he so desperately needed. In his anger he escaped to his room, me picturing all the while what would have happened if the bullet had been just a breath higher, a killing inch deeper.

I was ready to force the door open when it opened so slowly it was as if my intense glare had melted the metal lock and the door was opening of its own accord. He emerged in a bloody nightshirt with a dour expression on his pallid face and the length of his clothing bunched in a clenched fist. He insisted as I helped him to the settee that my treatment of him was not required but he would acquiesce if only for the good of my nerves.

I knew the moment I laid eyes on his pale and bloodied thigh that he was lying to me.

The wound was deeper than I imagined, not life threatening, but in need of stitches, in danger of becoming more than a mere nuisance.

He knew he needed help. He had orchestrated our entire fight, manufactured a reason to escape to his room and change into more concealing night clothes before coming out as a favor to me.

As I cleaned the area I watched his hand clench so tightly over the bundle of cloth covering his groin that the knuckles were absent of blood, white against the ruddy stains of his spilled blood.

The morphine bottle and his wretched morocco case were only an arm's length away from where he sat. He never reached for them, never glanced as he so frequently does in their direction.

It was not pain that afflicted him so deeply but suddenly it was pain that affronted me, threatened to swallow me in its black abyss in a away I have not known for years.

For whatever was causing Holmes such anguish, he felt as if he had to hide it from me.

Holmes often finds my conclusions erroneous but in this matter I do not have the luxury of asking his opinion. I thought for a moment of letting the matter drop but it haunts me.

I feel as if I am getting closer to one of the secrets of his past, as if I am edging nearer to an essential part of him. That I might discover just one of his secrets when he knows all of mine.

And all the while I feel as if I am betraying him.

He does not want me to know what torments him, that much is obvious, and yet I cannot keep my mind from it, from him.

I have tried to rationalize his decision not tell me to ease the pain of his mistrust. But he is incomprehensible to me. Is it that he believes it will change my opinion of him for the worse? Or is it that I am not worthy of his trust?

These are the things I tell myself when in my heart I know I am going against his wishes, that I am in a way, betraying him. In these things I know he is wrong. I am certain that no knowledge could ever have the power to make me feel differently about him. I know that whatever secrets I come across in his past I will never betray them to another living soul, that I would die protecting them as I would him.

The facts and theories mount and his past looms darker with every clue.

Looking back there has never been a single time where even on the purest of accidents could I have seen him fully unclothed. Not in the Turkish baths or the locker room of a boxing ring or even in our own rooms has he gone a single moment without some adornment when I myself had quite given up modesty with the men around me.

I watch each day the way he flinches away from the touch of others. What I once wrote off as an idiosyncrasy now cries out as an obvious clue. An amiable clap on the shoulder from an acquaintance unsettles him for minutes at a time, if only to my familiar eye. And on the odd occasion that one of our clients have felt compelled to hug Holmes his face becomes one of barely concealed panic, a look a loaded gun fails to produce.

My final clue is the strangest and possibly most telling of them all. The more I find myself observing his actions I find myself falling dreadfully off topic and admiring his beauty. Long have I described Holmes regal features, his aquiline nose, his long elegant fingers dancing across his violin with unparalleled proficiency, but he is in fact an ethereal beauty. Never have I described the luminescent glow of his smooth white cheeks, the elegance and simple beauty of his long sinewy limbs lacking the bulk of other men, the way his voice can jump from the most dulcet of tones to the highest pitch of exclamation.

I am sure that Holmes could deduce a dozen theories from this information and know exactly how to go about finding the correct one but I must blunder on alone. I have only one theory and the idea that he hides it from me is enough to keep me awake at night.

If someone has hurt him, if someone, as I believe, sodomized and raped my unwilling friend I will do my best to aid in his recovery. I will uncover the truth.


	2. Chapter 2

Should I approach Holmes with my conclusion I have no doubt that he will deny the facts, that he will tell me I have come to a dozen wrong deductions from all the proper clues. He has gone to lengths for years to conceal this secret from me and no matter how much I trust him I know in this matter I cannot trust him to confide the truth in me. Not yet.

I must continue to play this game with him, only now I hold more of the cards.

If he never tells me the truth of the matter I will not let it stop me from helping him.

I spend long days and nights contemplating what to do, imagining how his great mind would cope with such a brutal act committed against his body. Holmes who abhors touch, who neglects the needs of his body and keeps tight rein on every function of it, unable to control a single thing with all his brilliance. I have seen the scars of war, of tortures and wounds we do not speak of in polite society. I have seen men broken from less, men whose bodies I could mend but remain more broken than myself.

At night I see his eyes. Not the piercing brilliance of my stories, not the subtly fond gaze of my friend peering over the agony column. I see subdued fear. I see the tortures of war spread across his regal features, splitting his mechanical brain and twisting him. The anguish of an aborted touch.

Holmes deserves so much more than this half life in which he hides from his only companion.

I set about collecting more data. My pen and paper at my side, each letter written in my own personal code. At first I only observe, he has been in an ill temper since the night were I was forced to bandage his thigh. He scowls at Mrs. Hudson, barking orders which she obeys with a long suffering sigh, but when their hands brush he seems not to notice. In fact I observe several touches while Mrs. Hudson tries to clear away our breakfast and he gives her not the slightest notice except to growl when one of his papers is moved.

I make a mark in my note book as if writing down an absent thought, a look of lazy contemplation carefully on my face.

He seems to take no note of me, rather spending his time poring over old papers, throwing the ones he finds useless to the ground as if they would simply vanish the moment he no longer required them. Grey eyes flicked to me only once and only for a second. Abruptly he stood, clutching a small stack of papers with him and muttering that he would be back in time for dinner.

I thought my day would prove completely useless in this matter and spent several hours working on the most recent of my stories. I was in a state of near despair at my ill fortune when a cruel opportunity seemed to walk into my door.

In the hour before Holmes designated time to return I found none other than Lestrade in my doorway. The man took a step or two into our sitting room and when finding that Holmes was nowhere to be found made to say his goodbye when I stopped him. I find that Lestrade, while a decent yarder, is incredibly susceptible to praise. It took only a few choice words to get the current off duty detective to accept a drink and sit down to wait with a jovial smile on his face. While we spoke of his most recent case, with generous helpings of praise, I began to set the tone for when Holmes walked in. As oft as I could I reached out to clap a hand on his shoulder or even offer my hand, so impressed did I seem with his work. Three drinks had been imbibed in this manner with many jovial shoulder claps and hand shaking when Holmes finally walked in.

So confident and bursting with fulfillment and brandy as he was, Lestrade took only a minute to get up from his chair and in greeting to my friend clap him on the shoulder as he turned around to rid himself of his overcoat.

This was the moment I had waited for. I expected to see the stiffening of his shoulders like a large cat tensing to strike. I loathed that his face was turned from me in this moment for I longed to see his eyes as they, if anything, would be telling.

He froze, but only for a fraction of a second, so quick that Lestrade had not the slightest inclination that anything was amiss. When at last he turned a smile had been placed in his face for Lestrades benefit. His body did not tense, he did not draw away as quickly as possible, in fact he placed his hand on the small of the other mans back as he led him to the door. I could not hear what he said but whatever it was kept the affable smile on Lestrades face even as he was shown out.

I could hear Lestrades call of goodnight as Holmes turned to me, his false smile smaller now, more contemplative as if I was one of his mysteries once again. I was sure I was caught but he said nothing, choosing to sit by the fire, the smell of our dinner was already rising up the stairs and required no discussion.

He settled, stretching his long legs before him, his striking silhouette to me, his long finger curling together under his chin.

"Lestrade seems to be in a surprisingly cheery mood considering the man he believes is a killer is still on the loose, even before I told him that I will deliver into his custody the true killer in the morning." He waved his hand in my direction as an afterthought, never taking his eyes from the fire. "A trivial matter I assure you, I will require no assistance…unless that is you are inclined to spend more time studying me."

I had just taken a sip of my drink and I found myself chocking in a most ungainly manner, the liquor seared down my throat. I was caught after all. I had finished sputtering and regaining my breath when Mrs. Hudson walked in to save me, her silver tray my shining white horse.

I could not take my eyes off Holmes as he stood to his full height stretching his sinewy limbs in an unparalleled display of elegance.

"After all Watson your powers of observation are growing by the day but your deductive reasoning could certainly stand more of my tutelage."

I could only nod, astounded that I had not yet given myself away but even as he smiled at me and beckoned me to the table I could not shake the idea that he was playing with me.

As I sat and busied myself with my napkin so that he could not see my eyes I wondered not for the first time what he was thinking. If he knew what I was up to could he possibly be trying to guide me? Could he, in some deep part of himself, wish for me to discover his secret even if he could not manage the words? I tried to keep busy with my cup and silver, trying to look as if each object required my unabashed attention, but I know that when I looked up at him I still wore my heart on my face.

For the next few days I found that I was incapable of further setting up my friend purely for my observations. I could not get the image of out of my mind of his eyes boring into me as Lestrade was shown out. It was as if I was the last piece of a puzzle he desperately wanted to solve. When I close my eyes at night I see him watching me, with that smile as rare as the eclipse of the sun.

Again I found myself tempted to forget all of this, to put it out of my mind as some fanciful story I had made up. We know a peace in these rooms at Baker Street together that I imagine neither of us has ever felt. Why should I risk our perfect balance?

It is not my altruistic nature or my desire to seek only the best for Holmes that keeps me to my mission. Something has changed between us. He looks at me now in a way he never has. I do not know if he perceives in me some change or if he feels the way my eyes linger but gone is our easy companionship. The silence which once held only peace and acrid smoke is fraught with tension, as if a single spark could ignite us and I am unsure which way the flames would turn. Our easy friendship has become the pivotal center of my universe.

I have no choice but to finish what I have started.

My mind goes back to my early days in London when the smallest creak of a floorboard or the closing of a door would have my heart pounding in my chest, sweat forming on my brow and the only stable thing in the universe was his arm in mine. How I would have gone mad in those days had I not had just one soul to lean on, his strong arm leading me home when the world I saw was no longer that in which I stood.

I want to be that for Holmes, to be that one concession to life, to mean safety in a purposefully cruel world.

I want to be for him what he means to me.

Holmes has had no new cases since he delivered a murderer to Lestrades grasp almost a week ago now, a case that in its height was barely worth his effort. Normally by this point he would have begun the slow unstoppable slide into black depression, his melancholy lethargy overcome only to dose himself with hateful cocaine. Yet somehow he still sits across from me at breakfast, pecking at his food as if he is so far removed from his more human counterparts that the need for such things is beneath him. He eats as if troubled by something worthy of his genius.

I offer him a congenial smile over my copy of the Times, making an effort to make my every move seem energetic and approachable. I had hoped that my chosen mood might rub off on him but the more I tried the more I could feel him slipping away from me and further into himself.

I set down my fork resolutely and reached across the table, close enough to him that his eyes flickered to my hands as I poured myself another cup of tea. I did not waste this momentary attention.

"Yesterday at the club I ran into an associate of mine with two spare tickets to the concert tonight. I was hoping we could make something of a day of it if you do not have any other plans." I handed the tickets over to him casually, as if I just happen to keep theater tickets in my front pocket.

I watched the surprise race across his features before he had time to twist it carefully back into his expressionless mask. Not only were the tickets for a particular German composer he had on several occasions openly admired but they were of his favored box seats. Of course he knew immediately that I had myself purchased the tickets but I banked on even Holmes being too polite to point out my more than obvious attempt.

The contemplative gaze I received in return was well worth the effort, his voice was carefully as detached as mine was planned.

"And how do you propose we spend our day?"

"I was rather hoping we could take a walk, London seems less dreary today than usual and there are one or two book stores I have been meaning to visit." He gazed at the tickets once more and I could see the lust in his face at the mere thought of being immersed in the music of a genius composer. I knew that no matter what he thought of me or my theories that today he would be mine.

My plans were admittedly less than ingenious. Although I had managed to plan our day perfectly, coaxing him at last into the book store only for him to discover that the owner had a fascination with sensational literature, a lunch in our favorite restaurant, a composer he loved, the critical portion of the plan was somewhat lacking. I for my own part, did not know what to do.

I knew that my touch did nothing to disturb him the way another's would. We have spent long hours crouched together in the darkness of condemned places, our breathes mingling intimately, the touch of his body against mine our only comfort. Even before our partnership began in earnest there were times I would find his hand upon me, calming my shattered nerves or holding me together.

Even now that I am as well as I can hope to be his hand will grip my shoulder, my knee, with such meaning it replaces entire conversations. I am to Holmes the exception to the rule.

Until now I had let him take the initiative in touch just as I have let him control the exhilarating turn of the life he leads and I follow. When I reach across the table, through the papers and dished and the odd mesmerizing knickknacks of his profession and my hand lies upon his it is thrilling in a way I have no words to describe. His hand is warm and soft and still and without moving I can feel the calluses no man could match. It is strange to touch the skin of a man who exists purely in intellect; there is a thrill of power that runs through me to think that he would allow no other to do it. And when I look past our joined hands and into the face I know well I suffer a shock of something no words can describe.

When I looked up and saw his angular face and keen grey eyes frozen and looking upon me as if I were the only person in all the world in this heartbeat of time I knew I had my answer, my plan. My way to break through the shell of Sherlock Holmes.


	3. Chapter 3

It was I who took his arm in mine as we walked too close. Had I waited another minute I would have felt his hand on my elbow, felt him snake his arm through the crook of my arm as if declaring to all of London that I was his partner, his friend before all others. Now although the physical result was the same it seemed to me as if I was declaring that he was mine, that all who wish to do him harm would first have to go through me.

He stiffened as I did it, holding the position as solid and unnatural as stone in my embrace but as we walked together he loosened, his gait and manners falling into our old patterns. Once I even believe he may have smiled at the thought of what I had done. His voice was almost joyful in my ear as we shared the easy playful conversation of those who can finish each other's sentences and replace a story with a word.

Our day went quickly and although my plan seemed to go well I garnered no more reactions from him, not the raise of an eyebrow, not the involuntary stiffening of muscles. I made sure to lay my hands on his shoulders as he read the titles of books, to stand so close that a breath of wind could make our hands touch. Through our meal our legs brushed and entwined as we ate.

He braved it all without a word.

By the time we reached the concert I was lost in an abyss of despair and euphoria. All my hopes, my effort, was coming to nothing, no revelation shone on my horizon. I could perceive no turmoil in Holmes that I felt writhing within myself. Selfishly in a dark corner of my mind I rejoiced that I could do such things when no one else would be permitted. That I no longer had to be afraid to reach out and touch the man I long revered. Never again would I suffer the knowledge that I had nearly lost him through bullet or blade and not be able to reach out and touch him.

In my moments of weakness when the world seems too cruel to carry on I could reach out for my dearest friend and embrace him.

It was with the greatest ease that I accompanied Holmes to the concert. For those who have read my stories it is easy to imagine the scene. The way his eyes flutter closed, the way he seems to disappear into the music as if every note holds him on the precipice of euphoria.

I watched him as the lights dimmed and the crowd went silent, I watched as he gave me the smallest most private of smiles and he turned to the musicians. In the past I have always watched him from the corner of my eye, his enjoyment of the piece bringing it to life in a way I never understood before him. But this time I was different. This time he was mine.

The music surrounded us and I watched him swell with it, I waited until he was lost, until his whole world had melted into sound. The music was building, dark and tremulous to a rhythm like a heartbeat beginning to pound. In the darkness I reached out, my hand closing over his.

His mouth dropped open as if he might cry out but his eyes remained closed and so I held his hand in mine. I waited for the moment to pass, for the music to go grow sweet once more before running my thumb over his elegant fingers. The concert was moving on without me, the musicians playing their part but I could not look away from the site before me. Every touch I lay on him seemed to draw him further into my grasp, as if he could not stop himself from the sharp intake of breathe, the thinning of his lips.

The music was dropping, low and sweet and waiting to explode and it seemed to me as if he was struggling with himself, the battle in him raged, internal and almost imperceivable but with a breath, deep and desperate, he gripped my hand tight in his, holding me in place as if to stop me, yet threading his fingers through my own.

We stayed like this, holding hands like quarreling lovers, until intermission and the lights raised and the music stopped. He placed my hand back into my own lap, his eyes opened as if they had never been closed, the only clue that he had at last felt my touch lingered in his eyes, grey nearly consumed with black.

Without a word he left me. His long limbs taking him away from me and into the crowd beyond with the adept grace of an escape artist. I lingered in our box for the long minutes of silence, my hand stretching out before my eyes with new reverence, as if it had touched the stars themselves. I could not help but let the smile pulling my mouth at last take hold.

He slipped back to his seat with not a moment to spare, as the first notes drifted out to us I felt him beside me. I nearly forgot myself with mirth when I saw his hands entwined together in the center of his lap, safe from my chaste embrace. I let him imagine for the first minutes of sweet sound that he was safe from my onslaught, let him forget that I had ever tried to drag him from his shell and secrets.

My night was ending, the music was swelling and I was heady with success. In another time and place I would never have conceived such an idea but in the darkness I felt as if I could do no wrong. As if maybe we could go home and fix all the damage we had ever suffered, as I could at last be the healer where it was truly needed.

I could be more than a biographer or a partner or a doctor.

I could be the best friend he could learn to trust with more than his life.

My hand shook terribly, as if my wounds suddenly burned fresh in my limbs, my palm grew slick. The music was building, making me mindless, and erasing me as much as it was possessing him. It was at last as if my body had no use of my mind, my hand dropped to his thigh, a near caress and grip with a confidence I did not feel.

I wanted it to be one of those silent caresses that mean so much, a touch that took away the need for words.

I wanted to portray friendship and partnership and love in my grasp.

But he froze. His long body tightening as if I had poisoned each, solitary muscle. The joy dropped from his face, I had torn him from his music, his one place of safety, and now he sat like a dead thing, cold and stiff. Like the dead.

As if my touch had killed him.

A cold white hand closed at last over mine, holding it in place, pinning it between flesh and flesh. His face never changed, his hand did not move on mine, neither to push me away nor to show any human affection. I sat in a state of shock, horrified at what I had done and unable to pull away.

Did this merit in his brilliant mind an attack of the mental barriers and walls he so obviously established? Would this infidelity push me out of his trust and into the cold oblivion into which he pushed the rest of humanity?

The concert could have ended at any moment or lasted an eternity and I would not have made note of it. I became aware of myself only when the searing heat beneath my hand disappeared, replaced by cold air. I believe I may have sat there until the final lights went down and even the ghosts had disappeared for the night had he not taken my elbow. Together we walked into the London night and into the biting rain that pelted my cold form.

We could have walked the distance home with ease but I saw his eyes flicker to me and to the night around us as they do when he believes I am not watching him, the look that betrays a care for my broken body I have never felt. When he hailed a handsome cab and took my hand to help me in I felt the heart return to my soul.

Sick of my game and my failures I pushed myself as close to the side as I could but I could still feel his heat searing into me. I imagined that he would not want to be close to me, to one who would so knowingly ignore his boundaries and desires but there was little I could do. The driver was obviously new at his profession, his clothes worn down in places his shape would not merit, probably his father's clothes, and he lacked the knowledge all cabbies do of the pot holes of London. The handsome tossed and jarred and I could not help my body pressing against his, just as I felt the shame of this accidental touch, this accidental betrayal, his hand found mine, our fingers entwining under the cover of the doors.

I dared not look at him but somehow again he had portrayed more in touch than I could with all my books.

We were all right. I was forgiven.

Wet and chilled we made our way into our rooms, a fire burned in the hearth for our return but even with his forgiveness fresh in my mind my failure and cowardice drove me to seek solitude.

I turned to look at him for the first time since the theater, my body turned already to the stairs to my room.

Alone, he stood like a Greek statue staring into the sodden night, his face was not that of the deep habitual depression that time and life thrust upon him, it was the soft sadness of old scars pressing down on the shoulders of a brilliant man.

Today I had tried his every nerve, made him think of things long buried, dug up old skeletons and ripped him into pieces and here I was scurrying away like a thief in the night. Breaking him but not offering the help I had so longed to give.

Silently, because words were at last beyond my reach, I approached him, waited for wide grey eyes to turn to me. For the first time in all of our acquaintance I knew he was hiding nothing from me. A lifetime written in his eyes for me to read if I wished, a view of the man without the mask carefully crafted to keep humanity at bay.

When I stepped forward and wrapped him in my arms it did not feel like betrayal or failure.

When long arms held me close in our first embrace it did not feel like victory.


	4. Chapter 4

He is warm and damp in my arms. I can feel our wet clothes flush against our flesh, feel it cling to us both, plastering us together. My arms are stiff around him but he doesn't seem to mind. The moment I tried to hold him he began to hold me tighter as if I might change my mind and leave him.

I have not been held in years, since I was a child, memories as distant and forgotten as the life I have left behind. To feel them hold me as if I matter to them.

I can feel his breath on my neck. I can feel his heat saturate me, his heart is pounding against my chest.

My stiff unnatural arms slide closer around him and I wonder if this is what people strive for in their petty mindless lives, is this feeling which every soul spends their life chasing after? Like fighting until you forget who you were and a surrender that feels like home?

He makes no movement to pull away from me and I find myself wishing I could linger. Beneath my finger tips he shivers and as usual when it comes to Watson I feel things I never have, that I never should.

Sorrow and guilt twist my gut like a pang when I think of the pained looks he has given me for years, the way his hands twitched with need for more, with want for this.

How long has he gone without human touch because I keep him jealously as my own. How long has he wanted this from me? Needed this in his quiet suffering?

My Watson is trying to show me that it is alright to share my secrets with him. For weeks I have watched him toil over it, how to reassure me that I can trust him, how to say without words that he would never think less of me.

But he doesn't know. I have always trusted him, in the irrational way of the wayward softer emotions, in the pull of intuition and the factors of a million tiny details imprinting his character on my brain. But from the first time he walked into my life with eyes, filled not with horror but bemusement, his opinion has meant to me more than that of the world.

He has no idea the secrets I hide.

I bow my head so that my whisper is something secret and small in his ear, a confession and a beginning.

"Watson once again you have taken all the proper facts and made all the wrong conclusions."

He pulled himself away from me, his hands lingering on my hips, immediately I felt his loss, the cold rushed against my skin, invading the places he once existed.

"Then tell me what I have missed."


	5. Chapter 5

"This is, as stories go, much like your 'A Study in Scarlet'. It begins so far back in so complicated a manner that the characters you already know are players will not appear for some great many years. It is in a way like telling someone the secrets of another man's life. I am no longer the child I was, nor the man I became before coming to know you.

I was born into one of those picturesque country homes I so detest. One of those estates which linger untouched by the normalizing forces of society, just a few miles of fields becoming a world of distance and allowing its occupants to putrefy in their corrupted morality.

I was six years my brothers junior. Throughout the intervening years I believe my mother's inability to have another child was a great source of pain for her. My father was satisfied with the one child and feared for her health and the threat of another pregnancy. Though both he and the doctors warned her against having another child it had always been her dream to have a large family. It seems that she was his one weakness, he could deny her nothing when he would deny the world everything.

Mycroft believes that our mother was not a naturally sick person but that it was a childhood illness had robbed her life of its vitality and strength. She was forced to bed rest for nearly six months but still she regretted nothing, inviting my brother to play by her bedside, listening to our father disagree with the morning paper. Despite the best efforts of doctors and my father when the day came she was not strong enough to survive, but I was.

It was not as if she had given her life for mine, as if she had gone peacefully, knowing that I existed only because of her. But rather as I would be told every day of my young life I had "Torn my life from hers". As if she died screaming and clutching at life as I willfully destroyed her.

I do believe that there was a time that my father may have been uncorrupted, that he may have, before her death, felt compassion and affection for the whole of humanity. But for me he could harbor no love. Each passing year wrote my features more like hers. I shared her grey eyes, her raven hair, her high cheek bones, where Mycroft resembled our father I was our mother. By the time I was ten it was is if the very sight of me brought my father to a rage, each instant I existed I reminded him of his loss, of what I had taken from him.

I will not go into detail about those years. The way he spent and gambled and drank in his sorrow and rage until his family's money was all but spent but still he carried on purchasing the newest, the best, as if pretending to be real through objects. I will not linger on the extreme way he punished us for our every indiscretion. It is enough to know that we became in a way, perfect children. There was no class in which we were not the brightest, no sport or game we did not excel at, I had from the age of seven been the lead soprano in the church choir and Mycroft an unrivaled marksman.

It should also be said that the best was never enough. That there were times that it did not matter one wit what we had or had not done. Sometimes it was damning enough to dare have my mother's eyes.

It was clear by my brothers sixteenth year that our father viewed him as his salvation. He is, as I have said before, the most brilliant man in London if not all of England. Even at that young age he was more than qualified to attend university but the money had long since run dry and the idea of appealing to colleges to let my brother attend rankled his hazardous pride.

It was then that they came.

When anyone came to the door it was my habit to run and hide. Anything I did, anything I said could be wrong, could anger him and the rage would build as they chatted over drinks and cigars until the moment they left and all the wrath would crest and build and crash down on me in such a way that I imagined I would not survive.

Imagine my terror when it was not for Mycroft but for me for whom he called with a voice holding the poorly subdued joy of a mediocre actor observed by keen eyes and a trained ear. His suppressed smile was the first thing I saw as I made my way into the darkened room. I knew then, as he looked on me with joy, that my life would never be the same again.

Two men with dark clothing below my father's social status stood looking on me with greedy eyes. A briefcase lay on the table just behind my father, cheap leather gleaming in the low burning fire. My father bent to my level for the first time in years and his brown eyes caught the light so that fire danced in his eyes.

"Sherlock." His voice lingers even now in my mind, a resonance of that night, cold and malicious in a way I now identify with the most detached murderers. "Do you want to help your brother?" All at once I wanted to cower and lash out, to run and fight but I knew I stood no chance, my childish voice had been stolen from me.

"Sherlock." He growled with false affection. My eyes darted to the briefcase, to the eager eyes of the strangers, the closed door. I nodded.

He stood to his full height, towering over me so that the shadows on his face grew deep and strange. His hand fell on my shoulder and I flinched, my entire body turning from him, my hands rising to cover my face. I realized immediately my error, I waited for the hand to become crushing, but instead, slowly, it released me. The shadow of his shoulders slumped and a large white hand gently touched the side of my cheek, fingers gently tracing the skin to under my chin, forcing my face up to make me look at him for what would be the last time.

I did not understand then what it meant, to see his features so twisted, to feel a soft touch by brutal hands. I did not recognize the sorrow and regret in those motions until years and years had gone by and the child I was nearly forgotten.

Fingers traced over my cheek bones, past my eyes and I felt no fear, I had no data for this.

His voice was deep and almost wistful, a sound I had only heard in the dead of night when I hid in the shadows and the world reeked of whiskey.

"You did look so much like her."

And his hand was gone from my face, he pushed me towards the men.

Their large hands took my small arms, their holds engulfing me, swallowing me whole.

"Goodbye Sherlock."

I never looked back.


	6. Chapter 6

We walked into the night together. The men held me as if I might run; I cannot explain how foolish I thought this was. Where would I go, what should I do if I ran? I was only a boy, a child of barely ten with no experience outside of being a perfect marionette. Even if they meant to kill me a death by their hands would be quicker than starvation on my own. I was at a point of numb desolation, finally abandoned by all I had known I wondered if it would be better to simply die as my mother had than endure another day of my life.

We walked for miles without a word; I realized I had never even heard these men speak. In the darkness I studied them, I sought answers in their dirtied clothing and elated faces. We turned off the main road, into the forest I had once roamed. I knew where we were headed at once, the only marker of import in the countryside of green isolation. The old stone church was long since abandoned, it would sit untouched for years, forgotten, until another child turned of age and wandered its cold hollows. I had known the solace of its hidden spaces since I was but five.

The empty windows held a faint glow as we approached. I felt the tinge of the unknown, of these strangers in a place I had known so well, invading a place they did not belong. As we entered they called out in euphoric tones, an answering voice echoing out at us with the sound of scared children trying to pretend they don't exist, a sound I knew well.

They spoke in a thickly accented Italian, a language I had only ever heard in arias with mutilated translations beneath the notes and in the margins of music in piecemeal, _crescendo_ and _fortissimo_. I had studied Latin and the words jumped out at me at random but none of it seemed to make any sense. They were talking about nothing, as if what they were doing to us was nothing worthy of their breath.

There was only one additional man waiting in the church and two figures of children huddled together by the stone altar by which they had placed their small bundles of belongings. The man laughed and spoke as they pushed me towards the other boys. One I could tell was a year my senior but none the wiser for his age, his eyes large and doe like, looking at the men as if they might at any moment perform a trick. The other was younger, not more than six or seven, his skin flushed with fever, his sandy hair falling into his glassy eyes. He hid against the other boys side and never looked away from the men for more than a second.

The men looked on us with greed in their eyes and silence fell over them. One of the men who had brought me spoke a few soft words I could not understand but the feel of it was inescapable. It was time, if only I knew for what.

It was under the watchful gaze of their leader that the other two went to work stoking the meager fire and lashing my wrists in rope to the closest boy. It was the younger of the two who was tied to me, maybe they imagined that if I ran his small body would hold me up, or perhaps that his cries would give us away in the night. He cried as they tied him to me but soon his tiny body was huddled against mine, shaking the way I imagined I should shake if I feared death.

The last boy stood alone and unguarded, he looked on with interest at the proceedings. The light grew around us, reflecting the cold unyielding stone of our impromptu prison, creating a horrid contrast of the dark wet night outside the gapping windows. The bags were thrown without care onto the ground and a raggedy blanket set upon the stone altar. Metal tools were laid out, kept out of our site but glinting in the firelight as they were set down; one was thrust into the heart of the flame.

I saw before he did how they were turning to him, how their bodies changed and a whispered word from the beast leader set them in motion. I wondered as they took his hand and led him forward if he was dim, if biologically he didn't understand, couldn't understand the danger he walked so willingly into.

Under my arm I felt the other boy flinch. I felt through the coarse shirt he wore the bands of scar tissue running across his back. I clutched him closer.

The boy sat on the stone altar as they spoke to him in soothing words he did not understand. An aria came to mind, the notes floating unbidden through my mind, the words almost meaningless until now, until I heard them whispered to children's ears. And the only word I remembered was death.

He looked at me, the boy with his searching doe eyes, he smiled as if to say 'how strange these men are', to seek out connection not because he was afraid, but because he felt no fear.

Maybe this boy had never been given a reason to fear, maybe he had a mother who loved him, maybe no one had ever laid a finger on him. Maybe he was still a child.

He only began to yell as they pulled away his clothing, as large hands tore at little trousers. The two cronies took positions at his limbs, grown men pinning a half naked screaming child to the altar like a sacrifice. The beast seemed to take his time. He turned his back on me, picking up one of the glinting tools and cocking his head as the boy began screaming for help, as if listening to the finest details of a brilliant opera. He cried for his mother in the thick accent that spoke of the English countryside without any of the false propriety of my own home.

The beast turned and his beady eyes sparkled in the firelight like my father with a drink and a whip. He looked at me as he would pierce my very soul if he could, looking at nothing but me, acknowledging me in a way he would not do to the other boys. As the screams poured over us he smiled.

He turned again, his back blocking my view of the boy. His screaming grew as he saw what approached him. They hit a fever pitch to make your brain bleed; words disappeared and dissolved into mindless agony and terror.

By the time he exhausted his breath in the screams that fill nightmares and linger in silences he was fading to the sound of my heaving breath, to the soft desperate pant of the boy lashed to my arms and the lash of wet underbrush tearing into our skin.


	7. Chapter 7

No matter how far we ran we could hear the screaming, hear it rise and fall as the agony grew worse, as the tortures changed. The light of the church disappeared long before I discovered where we were. The woods changed at night, once welcoming branches appeared out of the darkness to steal chunks of flesh, hiding places suitable for me when I first found them were useless for two broken boys huddling together with monsters at their back.

As soon as we had been tied in the church I had begun working at our binds. The knot was loosened now but I feared stopping. We ran as if the hounds of hell were on our necks but his legs were shorter than mine, his infected body more easily tired. In the darkness he tripped and fell in stunted silence, his little body dragging me down to the earth with him. I tried to pull him up but he lay still as death on the ground. Together we lay in the mud, the sounds of men crashing through the woods echoed around us as if they came from every direction at once, as if they filled the very air.

I rolled into a half sitting position, ignoring the stinging of my cut cheek, the way blood filled my mouth. The knot took less than a minute to undo but not once did he move beyond the rise and fall of his chest. In the light of the moon filtering through the trees I could make out the glint of liquid spilling beneath his blond head. I knew before I touched his soaked hair and crimson stained my white hands that it was his blood. I could see now the tree root that tripped him, the rock on which he landed as he tried to twist and save me from the fall.

The sound was growing louder. We could not outrun them.

But perhaps I could. If I ran alone into the darkness they would find him, at least one would stop and remain with him. I would have a chance.

He took a wet breath; I could hear my own heart pounding in my ears.

The screaming had stopped. We were still close enough to hear but the boy with the doe eyes had stopped screaming.

I pulled the boy against my chest, heaving his dead weight as I tried to cover his spilled blood with underbrush, masking the tread of our fall in leaves. I wouldn't be able to carry him far, certainly not enough to run.

I had no choice.

The rotting hollow of a fallen tree in which we hid was barely twenty yards from where we had fallen but each step seemed like a risk, as if every tree hid a man with an unseen weapon, as if The Beast lingered in every darkened shadow waiting for us.

The wound on the child bled freely but it did not seem too deep, it was in part his fever that tugged him under the surface of consciousness. In the darkness I held him and pressed the wound, thinking of places we could go, of how long we could survive if we escaped, thinking of the boy who had not.

I could see their torch light circling the place we had fallen. Two moved passed it one at a time, following the obvious trail of the rope I had left tangled in a well placed bush leading away. The third lingered for a moment looking into dark oblivion but moved on my planned trail.

I had not seen the trail of blood we left in the darkness. I should have known, should have realized. Their glimmering torches caught splashes of crimson leading away, the beast circled around without his torch.

I did not know I was captured until I felt his hand on my leg.

They ripped the boy from my arms, I watched his small frame crumple limply to the ground as they grappled with me, as arms twice the size of mine held me so tight the world seemed to spin and blur. I screamed like a fool, as if it would help, as if anyone could hear me, as if they would save me if they could. All too soon I was out of air I could not replenish, thick meaty hands cut into my throat staving off the bitter night air.

The cronies had only been a step behind him, one hovered over me just waiting for a slip up, waiting for a botched escape so that he could pounce and be the man of the hour, so he could hurt a child and win the night. It was useless; I fought out of pride, out of a need to make them work for it, to make every inch and every impossible step a hell for them. It took all three to tie my emaciated limbs and only then at the cost of a bite of flesh I stole from the arm of the beast.

I hoped that if I fought hard enough, if I screamed and raged they would forget him, the child I had failed to save. If I took every ounce of their concentration, every drop of their greed and rage that maybe they would leave him, let him die and never wake up. To never regain consciousness and suffer what the other boy had, what I would surely feel. To let him die was the only thing I could do for him, I couldn't hope for him to get better in these woods, but I could perhaps give him a painless death.

We began moving, my legs never touching the ground; tied like an animal between two men I watched the beast kick the little figure on the wet forest floor. I watched the little chest rise and fall, I watched as he was hoisted like a broken doll into bloody arms.

For the first time I envied the doe eyed boy.

His pain was over, and ours had yet to begin.


	8. Chapter 8

It was in my nose, my mouth, before they ever carried me through the doorway. The unforgettable stench of charred human flesh.

The church was just as we had left it, its damp rock walls, its raging fire sitting in a circle of stones like a burning fairy ring. The only thing that had changed was the boy on the altar was no longer screaming.

They threw me to the ground facing it, facing him. I could see his eyes; wide open as they had been when he was still a real child watching the world as if nothing would hurt him. Except now he stared into nothing, his eyes glazed in the first sweep of death.

The beast stood with the little child in his arms barking directions at the other two, he stood where I would have stood if I was at home in the choir, standing in the front row where everyone could see me and no one could touch me.

The boy was still alive. The blood was still pumping, flowing off the altar, traveling in rivulets down the rough hewn stone into an ocean of crimson.

It was coming too fast, too bright to have seeped from a corpse. It was coming from his heart, the deadly beat pushing the blood out so that I could see every pump of life drain from him as his sightless eyes stared past me. His blood glinted in the firelight.

Cloth covered his bare body, only his legs and feet hung naked over the end, white cotton stained red, the stain growing as I watched it to drip onto the floor below.

The beast was still clutching the small boy when he walked over to their bloodied mess. He swept away bloody bandages, his hand turning the boys head, watching his ever shallower breathes.

One of the men pulled a gun from his coat, offering the butt of it to his leader but the man shook his head.

I understood the word 'loud'.

The two brutes folded the blanket carelessly over him, his arm made to dangle, his head lolling sickeningly. I wanted them to shoot him. I wanted them to end it.

They just pushed him off the altar, blanket and all. They let him fall. Let his head crack against the stone floor, let his body break as if it had never meant anything to anyone.

He stared at me, past me. His sightless blue eyes still trusting and open even as his head cracked open against the unyielding stone. Blood pooled around him, a blanket of red that reached out to me. I watched as he took his last shuttering breath, felt it in the air between us. I watched the final gush of blood from his heart.

The blood was seeping toward me, as unstoppable as my future, as our shared future. I didn't move as it touched my skin, as it curved around my tied arms, my bruised cheek.

The men had not noticed any of this. Already they were laying out their tools, thrusting them into the fire, laying out a fresh blanket which I did not doubt would serve as my funeral shroud.

When they lay the other boy down on a broken pew I knew I was next. I wondered at the time if they thought I would make another run for it, or if maybe it would be more fun with a boy who could still scream. The truth is, this time, I had not even tried to escape.

I could see the disgust on their faces as they lifted me. I could feel the blood matting my hair down, drying on my flesh.

They untied me and I fought, of course I fought. I wanted to kill them. I wanted them to slip up, to harm themselves with their own blades. I wanted to haunt their nightmares and ruin their waking hours until they took their own lives.

It was the Beast who tore off my trousers, ripping buttons and wrenching the cloth off my legs leaving me bare and exposed. He tore a strip off of my own ruined clothing and stuffed it into my mouth. I could taste the blood. The brutes held down my limbs so hard that I couldn't feel my hands, their thick arms pinning my thighs to the stone. The Beast stood between my parted legs, leaning his body over mine to get the tools placed just over my head.

I only saw the glint of the blade once.

I wanted to look but I couldn't move, a sudden terrible panic exploded from my chest. I wanted to scream, wanted to die. I didn't understand. I didn't know what they were doing; I could still see his dead eyes boring into me, still hear his screams.

No matter what my life had been I didn't want this. I could not survive this.

I felt his hand on me, holding me as if judging, measuring. I could hear the clink of metal.

I wouldn't scream. I wouldn't give them the satisfaction if that's what they wanted.

I heard him speak, a quick soft whisper, I felt the others tremble.

And then the cut.

Two. Quick. One after the other. And then burning.

I could hear the sizzle of my own flesh.

I could smell it.

"Holmes…you are shaking." He looked up from his twisted hands for the first time since he had begun his story and into the wide blue eyes staring into him.

"I am not shaking, I am shivering."

"You are doing both if you are doing one." Watson leaned forward out of the chair he had settled in as the story progressed, hands outstretched to obtain the touch he had forsaken to allow Holmes to sit and pretend that this was any other night before the fire, any other story.

"Watson." His voice was a quiet bark, his eyes focused on the hands reaching towards his shaking knees.

Watson ignored the look, the tone of his voice and settled his hands on his friends legs, waiting until their eyes met once more.

"Intellectually I understand that this is immense, that you have shown me a part of you that you have hidden for years. I understand that there are physical and emotional repercussions I cannot begin to fathom but you are right. Right now I can barely see you in that little boy; I cannot reconcile the two of you. Right now all I can see is my friend suffering, shaking."

Watson took a deep breath as if anticipating a fight, an argument, his hands steeling in place and waiting for the fallout but Holmes glanced over him but once. His eyes lingering on the concern contorting his friends face, even now the same Watson, the same kindness.

"Shivering." He corrected at last with the hint of a faded smile at the edge of his mouth.

He allowed Watson to pull the sodden jacket from his shoulders, setting it to dry by the fire where Watson hung his own a moment later, shrugging the sodden cloth off with a wince. For a moment they watched each other, like children come in from the rain with their clothes plastered down and too foolish to change.

After a moment's hesitation Watson returned to kneel at his friends side, his hands loosening the collar of Holmes's shirt, deft hands unbuttoning the cloth. Holmes flinched away from the touch, his hands snapping to hold his friends wrists.

"Please Watson, no more games. You have already won, you have broken me."

"I will not insult you with apologies when I would not take back a single thing if it means you will let me help you." Watson pulled his hands free and set them back to work, slowly unbuttoning as if by slowing the action it stopped the offence of it. "But I am your friend and your doctor and I will not let you sit here and suffer needlessly!"

Holmes lay his own shaking hands back in his lap, leaning back into the chair as if the thought of sitting up was too taxing. "then let me go back to my room and change properly."

Watson pulled the cloth from his friends trousers like he had done on a dozen such occasions when injury or depression staved him off from helping himself, sliding the wet cloth off pallid shoulders and revealing already chilled skin to the night air.

Watson stood and pulled the blanket from the back of the couch, unfolding it and wrapping it around his friends shoulders, crouching down to fold it around him.

His hand was still clutching the material together over his friends pale chest when he whispered so that Holmes had to strain in the silent night to hear him.

"I am afraid that if you leave me to go change you will never tell me the rest."

Without waiting for a response Watson stood and cast off his own soiled shirt, taking another blanket and wrapping it around his form before sitting down again, stretching out his legs by the fire as he watched Holmes tuck his knees close to his chest, his arms securing them in place, a position that while not unusual for his eccentric friend, had always made him smile.

"Now that you are shaking less-"

"Shivering."

"Shivering." Watson agreed, giving one last moment to the shell shocked humor he had fallen into. He was unsure if he could handle the rest but unwilling to stop.

"Tell me the rest?"


	9. Chapter 9

"The night faded into nothing. My consciousness became a puzzle of fragments. Sometimes I would understand the smell of burning flesh, my own mixed with something newer, something stronger, at some point I realized the boy I failed to save was pressed against me, never crying but scalding hot against my flesh.

For days we were given almost nothing to drink, periods of consciousness were an agony. We were too weak to fight; fever and infection ravaged our mutilated bodies. I believe in those first days we were too ill, too obsessed with want for water to realize what had been done to us.

What is pain in an existence of pure agony?

Wakeful hours became a puzzle of lost time. There were moments of darkness with scattered voices, the rhythm and resonance of Italian so sweet and melodic from my past, twisting with the images that haunted my mind. Voices growling in a language I had once found escape in.

My memories blurred and meshed until hours could have become days and days years and I would not have known. Only one sharp night stands out among the miasma. We were given water. We were near death for want of it, wretched with fever and our tongues so thick in our mouths we could hardly swallow. We drank greedily, half dead and in mental oblivion we drank.

And when we could drink more they held us down and poured it into our mouths, whispering always in their foreign tongue something soft and repetitive, as if their voices could ever be a solace to us.

Our bellies swelled with it and the infection raging within kept us half mindless. I thought nothing of it, brought so low that I could not remember an instant of life without this pain, I did not know to rail against it. It was only when they stripped me of my clothing that the sluggish mechanism of my brain turned over a single thought.

I remember sitting there as if waking from a dream, looking down for the first time and seeing myself mutilated and broken apart and scalded. I knew in that instant that the future that once lay before me shattered and my already tentative dreams had dissolved into nothing. The skin where I once existed was ugly and mottled; a thick, bright, shining scar covered the mess between my legs.

My stomach rumbled as the water pushed through my body. I knew what they had done, what I was expected to do.

The child at my side began to cry in his half consciousness. He sobbed that it burned, that it hurt, he cried out in his child's voice that he needed to pee and the men watched us without understanding a word, without having to hear him cry out for a mother who would never come.

The pressure built impossibly, all pride had been stripped from me, my mutilated body put on display for cruel eyes that waited for me to soil myself. I closed my eyes against the Beast, against the crying child, and tried to disappear into myself, to focus on the fever, to feel only the biting cold against my skin.

But I could not block out his screams. Eventually my eyes tore open, watching with detachment the puddle of blood and urine pooling around him, part of the ragged scar he now possessed torn open again, raw and painful looking. My immediate future laid out before me.

I found out later that we were lucky in this. We both survived even under the care of such ignorant, brutish, philistines. Even this ragged memory could have been made worse.

After that night there were moments when I approached consciousness enough to know that we had traveled a great distance, that days had passed in a haze and the countryside of my childhood was far behind.

Slowly I came back to myself more and more. I had caught a fever; my limbs were weak with infection and blood loss but I found that the men no longer hurt us, no longer touched us at all if they could avoid it. We traveled in an old carriage, the two of us thrust in the corner as if our afflictions were catching but we were given food and water. As soon as I was able I began to care for the other boy, I would rather have an ill child as my only companion than let them lay a hand on another innocent boy.

My clothing came from the sack the dead boy had brought, his rough clothes hanging loose on my thin body and I was grateful. My wounds ached, a constant reminder of my fate, a fact I would not for a single moment forget. I drank little, fearing having to empty my bladder, letting myself get sicker from fear while forcing liquid on the child.

Time passed slowly and quickly all at once, it was distorted the way illness makes a second seem a lifetime and a year but a heartbeat. The outside world began to fill not with voices I knew but a language I understood in pieces. I had only a year of French studies before I was forced to stop, Mycroft told me in the darkness after the fall out that it was because I sounded so much like her.

The men began to chatter more, silence which had once reined was now a rarity. Something was about to happen.

We were in the countryside, that fearful place where evil hides in pockets just beneath the surface of perfect landscape. We had avoided all major cities in our journey but now the road grew progressively more rustic, the voices outside our door became the rough hue of farm hands and children.

Then one day we stopped.

We were forced out into the bright sunlight, our eyes blinded after lingering in the darkness for so long. The grass was soft beneath our feet, the smell rose up around us fresh and clean and warm. If you listened closely beneath the breath of the wind was the sound of people working, laughing. Living just out of sight.

Hands closed around my arms painfully, reminding me of the darkness from which I had emerged, standing together we smelled of blood and fever and long illness. They dragged us toward a building looming in the distance. I blinked against the sun and could make out the figure of a man coming towards us, a hurried step compared to our decrepit stride.

His clothing was plain, a member of the church, his hair was graying at the temples and the look on his face was of carefully school disapproval. For long moments the men stared at one another. The newcomer asked if they spoke any French and felt a thrill go through me. Not once had I had any hope of the workings of this until now, I knew what had happened but not the purpose of it, not what lay before us if escape was impossible. The beast growled back in Italian and with an increasingly animosity, his hands crushed my arms.

They spoke quickly, now and again gesturing to us, the Beast shaking me for emphasis, again and again they pointed. Only two.

The Frenchman's face dropped and I knew what story they were relaying but what did it mean? If there was a pay off had he already paid for three of us or was his anguish for the loss of life itself? If money was changing hands, if we were property, who could want us? What could be done with us?

The Beast shook me again, hard, his free hand raised above me in a familiar angle, I closed my eyes against the blow but a voice called out. The almost genial face of the newcomer had grown cold and hard, his speech was rapid and terse. He held more cards than my captors had anticipated.

They stopped talking. It was a nod that finished it. It was only a single piece of paper that changed hands, a note as flimsy and inconsequential in appearance as the breeze, folded and sealed and worth my life. The crushing grip holding me in place released, I fell to the ground where I watched as they turned their backs on us, watched my nightmares walked away.

Where I stayed until they were no longer even a speck on the horizon, nothing but a stain of a memory.


	10. Chapter 10

It was in this place in which I learned what I was and what meaning which lay beneath the blood. We had been born into a dying breed. For centuries this mutilation had been commonplace, too often preformed on children too young to protest, without benefit, without a foreseeable future. Children not with a beautiful voice but those whose parents lacked funds, those unloved thousands. And so it was condemned, made illegitimate, frowned upon, but its products in only the most select of mutilated individuals retained a glistening fascination for the world. A demand existed in the very people who had damned it.

It was in this place that I first heard the name of the Castrati of Italy. Boys and men with the voices of the angels themselves. How they shone brighter than the stars in the artificial light of the opera stage, how they could make grown men weep with the beauty of their voices resonating through the grand churches of the civilized world.

It was in this place that I learned I had been created like Frankenstein's monster, demanded into existence like his unwilling mate.

The music the churches and operas had grown to love was becoming stagnant; the older ones were dying out with no youths to replace them. No fresh faces, no new voices or talents, only aging men whose plump flesh and wrinkled skin looked sour in the roles portraying the blush of youth. They feared a time when they would have to allow women to take their places in lieu of silence, they feared as men do, change.

There were orders appearing behind gilded masks and mountains of gold. Allowances were created, men dispatched, others blackmailed or pushed into training, and to hiding these broken children until they knew who was of worth. Until all of the promise dropped away and only fact remained. Until they wanted us.

The men were kind to us. They treated our wounds and fed us, bathed our little bodies and found suitable clothing for us to wear. It must have taken nearly two weeks for me to understand that they would not harm us, that they were honest when they insisted they had no part in our creation. Until that point I had not spoken a single word, I had imbibed only what was absolutely necessary to survive, my waif form becoming skeletal. I never slept more than an hour at a time tucked away into the darkness of my room, awakened by nightmares and kept up by fear.

By the time I understood what these men were and that they did not pose a threat to us I had heard enough of their language to speak with them, the words giving power to me when I had for so long had none.

They did not treat me like a child, they did not withhold information or condescend me as I believed they would. They maintained at all times a sort of brutal honesty I could not help but respect even as is tore the last shred of who I was to pieces.

After the physical pain had subsided and using my new body became not a trail but a habit, it became to me as if it had never been done at all. Creating a family of my own after enduring my childhood was never what I had wanted for my life, to destroy a child as completely as I had been destroyed or to let death snatch a spouse from me and take my mind with it. I put these thoughts from my mind at last without pain. The mutilation itself which had once caused me great shame and brought me to a boiling rage faded into the background of my existence like the scars of a wound.

The injury remained but it was as if the full physiological trauma which I had only days before felt so keenly had frozen in time. I felt that as long as it lay unmolested in the recesses and dark places in the attic of my mind it could never hurt me. I could invalidate what they had done to me, invalidate my very existence by denying anyone who had done me harm a single thought.

The monks with whom I lived never pushed me to remember, never asked me stories about my life and they set an example I could follow and lose myself in. The lives which they had led before this place were inconsequential; it was as if no place existed but here, but these people. They woke early, singing and studying and doing what they needed to sustain their bodies while emphasizing the mind.

Nothing was denied me, no room shut away, I roamed the halls, haunting the library, churning over the pages for as long as the light would hold out. Losing myself in knowledge, creating power where I had none.

One morning they found me asleep, my face pressed into the pages of a chemistry book I had been having some difficulty with, the language and advanced technique making my eyes blur in the dimming light of the night before. That day they began my lessons. They taught me chemistry and mathematics, never holding back because I was young, never reprimanding me for my questions. I disliked the falsehoods of literature and history but they insisted on teaching me, insisting that my education be respectably rounded if I was to bother at all.

It was with trepidation that they began the core of my intended studies, my vocal training. I had told them nothing of my past, of any skills or talents that I may have possessed. The first time I sang for them I could see the relief upon their faces, the glee. The wonder. I knew what they feared for I felt that same fear for the mute boy at my side. What if it was all for nothing?

This life had been chosen for us and yet we did not know if we could live it. They had taken us without hearing a note. They had mutilated us without even knowing why.

It was weeks before we could get the boy to sing. He had not spoken a word, not even to me. We had gone through hell together, been snatched from our homes and carried to a foreign land with no other company and I did not even know his name. But when he sang, it was worth every moment of silence. His voice was sweeter than my own, less powerful, more childish, more innocent.

Even after he never spoke, he worked and studied. He learned the musical theories I had grown up with and his untouched voice was molded in their hands, but he never spoke a word of French or English. It was as if those men had stolen more from him then his manhood, it was as if they had stolen the sound of his waking hours. Only in the night when we were alone in the darkness of our room and he was lost to dreams could I hear his voice cry out for help.

Then again maybe this damage had been done long before I shared his story.

Our tutors and caregivers explained to me how even after the operation our voices could still change, could become not one of a man but something small and useless, something broken. Something in my mind, that would have been almost unbearable. Even after what it had brought me my voice was a comfort to me, something I could control, something that I could hide from the world and keep only for myself or let fly free. It was my one connection to the only world which had ever touched my soul, my only door into the realm of music, without it, I didn't exist.

They said we must prepare for that fate, that if I lost my voice I must be able to carry on. Of course I was expected to keep up with my general studies, which I took to with great aplomb, but they saw in me a talent, a need to linger in notes and resonance. They gave to me a gift which I will always be thankful for.

My first violin.

Time passed in these walls the way sand slips through an hourglass, silent and often unobserved. When I was not devoured by my studies I was enraptured with my violin, barley a waking hour was spent without my mind ravenous upon the next detail, the next note. In an attempt to draw me out and open my eyes to the world, to make me less like stone and feel human sympathy, they began bringing me papers, going over stories from all the great cities of the world. It did not matter how old the papers were when they got to me, only that they continued to come. I was enraptured by the stories I found, of tragedies solved and revenged, of theft and murder. Suffering that was not my own, suffering that could be fixed and remedied and examined analytically until no emotion remained and everything became intellectually perfect. Soon I began taking down notes, clippings, discovering in the often embellished words of the writers a hint of truth that only days later would prove the key to everything. It was like creating perfection from chaos.

I spent the next five years of my life in this place. I could have escaped if I had wanted, I believe that if I had expressed even a fleeting desire to leave the monks would have helped me get home at their own peril, but in truth I no longer had a home outside of my own mind. There was no one in the world outside of those walls who even knew I existed. Somewhere far away Mycroft must be at university, safe in London away from our father, forgetting I ever existed, maybe believing that I had died years ago. My father, had he walked in the door and fallen to his knees I would not have seen him; he was to me, already dead.

There were no other children in that place, and even if there had been I have reservations of whether I could have seen them as my peers. I no longer saw myself as a child or a man, I was a product unfinished, a mind half filled, potential yet to come to fruition. In short years I had gained all the knowledge I could from our library, I was in a word, a prodigy. Tutors were bought with the silent money of those who had ordered me into existence. They came from Paris, from Naples, lingering until I had taken all I could from them, until every detail of sensational literature was torn from their minds and copied into mine.

I knew during those years that the men who cared for me had grown to love me. That in their world of celibacy and ended lineages' I was their child. They had taken me from shadow and blood and made something beautiful. I would have loved them back if I could have, they deserved that from me. I imagined at the time as I watched the pride and fondness in their gaze that I was beyond the human capacity for emotion, that the injuries I had suffered had stripped me of my humanity, that I had studied so long that nothing remained if me but a mechanical mind.

I did not know then how one may bury emotion with trauma, too broken to feel. Despite all of my studying I did not know that no skeleton can remained buried forever and that when old wounds reopen they are just as painful as the day they were inflicted, as if none of the interlacing years had ever soothed you at all.

I did not realize until years too late that I had probably loved them all along.

I was fifteen when they came.


	11. Chapter 11

They came this time not in the dead of night with a sack of money from a golden tower and a hidden blade. He came with a gilded carriage in the garish light of day, the horses white and shining like a painting by an idealistic dreamer. His clothes ornate and rich and glistening in the sun, a harsh contract to the simple rough clothing I had grown used to. He was like a single thorned rose in a field of soft green grass. A beaded drop of crimson poison falling into a vase of pure water.

The day that he walked up the long path to the main gate I had had no new tutors for weeks. Long ago I had absorbed the library, memorized every word, every theory and idea, the news papers were filled with nothing but the mindless penance of crimes so easy to solve that the solution and the problem were held within the span of a single article. Even then at that early age I could feel the slow black panic of endless nothing rising upon me. I suffered mental stagnation which not even my violin could save me from.

I was in shadow and darkness when he came with his too vibrant voice, his accent something sweet and melodic as if the very air of the city from which he came was made of melody and light. This was the Italian I had known before the words had meaning and there was nothing more than notes, this was not the language I had learned in the dead of night with the scent of blood rising around me, not the one I clambered to learn and posses so I could never again be left in the dark.

When he spoke I knew that I had become the commodity they had set out to create, I was in their eyes, invaluable, the product of perfection they had desired for so long. He did not speak of generalities to me, he spoke like a man who had done his research, a speech created just for me, to catch my eye and my heart.

He spoke of libraries larger than the monastery which had become my entire universe; he spoke of the best tutors of Naples and Rome, of Masters of the arts and sciences who would give me all they know. He spoke of a city which never sleeps, a city which attracted the great minds of the day, each attracted by the shining light of the city. He spoke of the opera, of playing a character, of traveling the world, of making so much money in a season that no one could ever harm me again, of being safe, being independent. A life lived in the realm of the mental and the exquisite.

He didn't speak of the truths I had already stolen from papers and minds, the ones I knew existed when the powers that be would have me ignorant. I knew the way men looked down on what I had become, the looks of distaste and disdain I would acquire, how I could never hide in the shadow, always the bright star of the opera. He didn't speak of whole opera houses knowing my secret, of the world being privy to my own private disaster.

He didn't speak of the way my voice could never override my mutilation, how beneath the shallow sound of applause they would only be thinking of my damage. They would never really see me at all.

But the world in which I lived grew smaller by the day.

I could suffocate in mental stagnation or be a toy on stage, a monkey trained to dance and sing and wallow in false tears.

What I was made to be, cut and torn and shaped into this unnatural thing.

A voice to justify my existence.

All he asked for the world was my soul.

What was an intangible soul when you had the knowledge of the world at your fingertips?

* * *

The day we arrived the school was in a state of controlled chaos. Not a single pair of eyes spared me second as they flew down halls and corridors in lurid costumes, instruments marched past me as if they had a mind of their own, the humans carrying them only dutifully following in their wake. Notes and bars of music erupted as if from nothing from the very walls, voices and instruments fell in harmony and then apart as if they had never joined. Boys ran under foot and not one stared at my rough clothing, not a single glance lingered on my too smooth cheek.

My guide led me but I hardly needed him at all. I followed the thread of chaos, wandering to the place where the music grew and fell, where voices laughed and footsteps hurried.

I heard the melancholy cry of a violin before anything else. It came to me as if cutting through the noise of the outside world, creating reason where only madness lingered before. As I approached the grand doors others joined in, instruments and musicians coming together to create one sound. I could see it perfectly in my mind's eye, an orchestra such as I had only ever dreamed of.

It was the first time I ever heard another of my own kind sing. I had until this point been in a species of two, orphans of a lost people, without a home, without a culture. Without knowing what we were or what we could be.

The music played and raged and dropped away with an abruptness that stole my breath. I pressed on, throwing open the doors to the theater to hear the first sweet sounds of the Italian castrato.

My eyes closed as the sound washed over me, something sweet and high, a perfect C. The piece was not familiar to me, obviously a student composer, but it did not matter to me as the voice rose and fell. Something more substantial than a womans voice, a sound that clung to childhood with every note, every trill making me imagine green fields and laughing children.

I stood there as unyielding as if I had been made of stone until the song ended releasing me from its grip. Children, boys I realized, ran onto stage with their colorful outfits, their young sweet voices rising with that same unique sound and I realized what they were. Castrati.

In the span of a heartbeat I had joined a civilization of creatures like myself and they sang on as if oblivious to my realization, as if it meant nothing at all.

My guide took my hand and led me to the front of the room. The empty theater looked as if it were sleeping, a room of empty chairs only waiting for the proper moment to fulfill their reason for existing. Only a handful of men sat in the third row, watching with rapt eye's, some taking notes, some looking as if they could absorb each detail so precisely that should you ask ten years from now they could tell you the smallest detail of the most negligible singer.

The music stopped and one of the men in the audience called out for a break as a fresh crew of workers appeared with paints and tools, their eyes greedy upon the stage set.

I watched not the men talking now in hushed tones but the boys filing off stage, how the apparent leader, the boy who had given me my first sound of this new life had his wary eyes locked on me.

He was, in my eyes, everything I was not. While I had grown tall in the intervening years, my limbs long and lithe as they are now, he was nearly a head beneath me and rounded around the edges, soft as I imagine a woman might be. His features were soft and pale, even his was hair such a shade of blond that it was as if he had no defining features at all, he was a human shade of grey. As indefinable as he was I was equally distinct. My features had grown sharp and blatant, the high cheekbones of my mother creating hollows in my cheeks, my long nose cutting across again, not ugly, but certainly not traditionally beautiful. Even my raven hair was in opposition to this soft creature, the harsh shining black even more shocking now that I had spent years keeping my skin from the light of the sun.

He had made his way down the stage and directly in front of me, all the while judging me, sizing me up without even offering a word or a single sign of the social grace the monks had insisted the rest of the world used in everyday practice. My guide had gone off to the whispering men and their notes, standing like a foolish child to their side waiting to be noticed, too unimportant to speak up. I was alone when the boy first spoke to me.

"Castrato." It was not a name or a greeting, it was not the greeting of brothers, it was antiseptic, unemotional. Nothing but a label. He looked me up and down as if he could read me with the same ease that he determined my dearest secret.

"You are too old to come here to train." His bland face churned, hip pale lips pulling into what might have been a sneer. "But there are always the churches for the ones that don't make…the cut."

The voices to our right rose above a whisper, the men were standing now, looking at the two of us. My would-be guide had caught their attention, he was gesturing towards where we stood, his back to us so that I had no hope of disconcerting his words. The boy as indefinable as a thick mist smiled as if the year or two he had on my age constituted a lifetimes worth of superiority.

"It is a shame you came now. The masters will not even have time to hear you until days from now. The show, my show, opens tomorrow and all the great composers will come, all of the masters of the opera houses. No time to spare on the hopeless."

The way his words twisted with mirth and malice, his sweet soprano tinkling like the siren call of the devil, I knew he felt sure he had dealt me a devastating blow. As if my entire self worth rested on a single child who did not know enough of the world to understand that he knew nothing. His emotionless lips pulled higher into a facsimile of a smile as the masters came towards us, his hands raised to great them.

It was my hand they took. My ragged body they pulled into their arms with smiles as bright as the saved, as perfect as the images of angels painted on the very walls of this city. Their voices rained down on me, voices of the masters I would learn from reiterating my own story to me, the praise I had heard a million times over, imploring me to sing.

The boy who had been so quick to judge me, to alienate me from the people I did not even have the chance to hope to belong to looked scorned, beaten down with every word that fell. He stepped back, there was jealousy in his eyes, the glint of fear and the dare for me to do better.

Had I been more mature I would have sung for the masters, perhaps even gone into some private chamber with more dignity than the aisle of an empty theater, but I was only 15, a child with no concept of other children, of humanity. I wanted it to be my voice that sent him away from me.

I looked past him like I had never noticed he was there, as if he was not my first experience with someone like myself, like the hopes that had barely begun to live in me had not died with his words.

The workers banged out a tune of their own, hammer on nail, brush on cloth, the almost imperceptible hum of dozens of people working. I could feel eyes on me, I was the center of an impromptu performance, the man on a soapbox in a crowd, the one everyone wanted to see but no one knew why.

When I sang the workman stopped, the shuffle of feet and life and work and play stilled as if time had stopped and all eyes turned on me. Music no longer erupted from the pit in half thought melodies and careless songs. I was the only source of sound, my voice rising to the high ceiling, reverberating against the walls, filling us all. It was something simple and beautiful, unadorned like the student composition I had heard only a moment ago. I wanted to put that sound to shame, to erase his voice from my memory. With Handel's music my voice could not fail.

I was fulfilling the purpose for which I had been made.

The show went on, it opened the next night as planned and the crowds cheered and the boys sang and the lead with the jealous eyes bowed and reveled in false love. But every spare moment the masters possessed was spent with me.

The night they opened I sat in the first row with my silent companion of so many lifetimes ago as guests of honor. We watched the theater fill around us, people dressed as beautifully as the daydreams of children, like human butterflies drifting towards the light, painted and tied into beauty. I watched the crowd swell, heard them whisper in excited sweet Italian not of mutilation and stolen manhood, never speaking the word eunuch with its dark connotations, its pain and blood, but whispered with adoration and wonder. Castrato.

It was when the crowd was standing and cheering around us and at my side the child I had been created with was smiling like a real child that the master of the school leaned over and whispered in my ear that the next time I heard this sound, it would be for me.


	12. Chapter 12

As has always been true in my case I found that regardless of how my life was or what it entailed I was able to excel at my studies. I was not put with the other boys of my ilk; instead the masters favored tutoring me in private lessons. I was their star, their gift from god, I was their great hope. When they spoke together of me, of my talent or my voice they told each other that I would be the next Farinelli, that my name would be on the lips of every man, woman and child in Europe.

The school would have preferred me to focus on my voice, on the stage, but they had shown their cards too quickly. I understood the power I held over them, I felt how desperately they wanted me. I had been promised the world and I would have it.

In addition to my vocal training I was allowed to apprentice with the greatest scientific minds of the bustling city, lingering in the shadows of the long afternoons in darkened laboratories. What initially began as the school bargaining to let me apprentice quickly became a true partnership. These men did not know what I was and they never asked. At first they saw only a child, a way to extra grant money perhaps, but it was impossible to ignore my questions, the rate at which I absorbed every detail of what they did. Within weeks I was less of a student than a partner, it was under their watchful eyes that I ran my first true experiments. Together with my study of sensational literature it was here that I began my first studies with hemoglobin.

My academic progress severed only to put in sharp relief how ignorant I remained when it came to the basic nuances of life. When I had spent years with my head bent over a book others had spent in the light of the sun, laughing and sharing in a way I could not understand. It was as if the rest of the world shared a language I could translate and evaluate intellectually but I would never be able to speak.

I could understand, intellectually, why bonding was important, the human imperative to belong, to have a niche to return to when the world was cruel, a place that they could feel safe even if they were not.

The idea of friends was to me a hypothetical. It was something I read about in the fictional books the monks made me read in a thinly veiled attempt to breed in me a soul. Friends were fictional characters who became inexplicably close to you without ever trying, they knew every secret and ghost and somehow still cared. A friend was a reason for living besides yourself.

So when I saw the fake smiles and false laughter between my peers, when I saw the bitter competition, and I heard them cry out 'friend' I did not understand. It sickened me in a way I had not felt since I watched my captors walk away all those years ago. I could not imagine having a friend, sharing so much of myself with another person, exposing myself. And they were so comfortable with the notion that they could call out 'friend' to people who did not merit true emotion, who were worth no more than a poor facsimile of a smile.

Long hours I spent examining my peers, the people of Naples in their brightly colored glinting clothing, and every day they grew less beautiful. The laughing women were no longer the angels and cherubs in paintings but the harsh black and white names in journal articles, five dead, child gone missing, man poisoned. I cataloged reactions, responses, I learned how to fit in, studied people with the same fervor that I took to all my studies. If I had to I could fit in, put on that mask and no one would ever suspect, but I would never really understand.

In all the great transitions of my life I have found that it takes the span of several weeks for the new to become routine and then, sometimes, mundane. This time is unique in that it can define the course of a life, how you will live in this place, how you will see the world, the person that you can be and will become. I did not understand this concept yet, I was learning a new culture, my mind was dizzy with the first burst of new information after being so long in stagnation. I was trying to see through the mask that every city wears and find a home in it when home to me was still a darkened place in which a child may hide and never be found.

It was during this time of precious change that I discovered the facts that had eluded me for years, that I let my captors reach out from my past and break me once again.

* * *

It was a student teacher who sat down with us across an untouched meal to discuss the basics of the world of opera and our inherent role in it. We had already been in Naples for weeks and it was becoming apparent that we were not like the other children, that we would not fall into the pattern set out for us.

I still remember the face he made trying to draw emotion from the two of us as if we were wooden puppets. As I said before I was still transitioning and thus spoke little, in combination with my mute companion we were a force to be reckoned with in the eyes of the socially acceptable. He drew out in simple terms that which I had already perceived from snippets of observed conversations. First we would have to put out word how we were put into this current condition, how as he put it, we joined the ranks of the castrati. To circumvent the decree that no more children should be castrated boys were appearing with far- fetched stories which no one dared to question lest they go against the church.

I had heard the stories already, heard the boys say them so often that it was as if they were trying to convince themselves of their reality to forget their true pasts. The boy who so quickly chose to be my rival had suffered an attack by an enraged bull, another had fallen from a horse, another fell ill at an early age and no cure was known except castration.

He asked me with this serious yet purposefully casual face how I had been castrated.

There were few times in those years in which I laughed, fewer times still in which I felt more than a single emotion at a time but I distinctly remember my boiling fury barely contained and the laughter which threatened to erupt from me like madness when he dared say the words.

"I was taken in the night and mutilated."

His jaw dropped and it appeared as if he had lost control of all of his facial muscles, even his blinking seemed to slow. My companion slipped a small hand into mine and through the deadpan face he wore I could see the same conflict of anger and pure euphoric laughter threatening the seams.

After he took a moment to recover himself, taking several labored breathes and casting his eyes around us as if to locate a spy to repeat my faux pas to the world he could only shake his head, his words breathy as if less substantial under the weight of what I had said.

"But surely you misunderstood the question."

I was heady with the reaction I drew from him, he was no longer an innocent bystander to me but part of the political machine that had stolen my life from me and my fury grew. A strange bitter satisfaction swelled within my breast, it was my first taste of vengeance and it only amplified when the little hand in mine squeezed tighter around me.

"I am sorry, perhaps I did was not detailed enough?" I cocked my head and pulled my features intro the perfected mask of easy nonchelaunce, I knew the effect my stern features had on these people so used to the soft faces of women and eunuchs. "I was found in the woods and taken screaming to an abandoned building where the men killed one boy and mutilated me without sterile equipment or anything to numb the pain. My companions story is the same."

All the color had drained from his face and I could hear the soft muffled laugher of my companion, it did not sound like the laughter of a child as much as it sounded like the choked hysteria of the damned.

"I believe that it is suitable for our purposes. It was after all in the eyes of the law not an operation as much as a murder and torture."

By the time he disappeared into the crowd and into the safety of his own false home we were both laughing as we had not done in years.

It was only a matter of minutes before one of the masters came over to us, gathering the other mans books in front of him and apologizing for his hasty retreat, making his cursory excuses. With a twisted half smile that told me more than words ever could he assured us that our story would be more than suitable and that it was ours to tell if we wished.

I had worked with this man before and knew that he regularly taught my silent companion and so begrudgingly he captured more of my respect. He sat across from us now a middle aged man but years ago he had been one of those failed children of the last generation. It was not that his voice was not beautiful enough to command the stage, his voice had changed despite the operation and he knew a pain more exquisite than I could imagine.

He explained in a calm voice that we were talented, both of us, even if we did not progress a single iota after that day we would still not be the nameless boys of the church, we were destined to be on the stage. He spoke in such a matter of fact way it did not sound like a torrent of compliments as much as an application for a job, something we must accept. A significant part of our lives from this point of would be the draw our names created, as if we were creating a new word with a new meaning, our names would be synonymous with greatness.

We could choose stage names as many had done, we could shorten or change names and in the case of the boy at my side, give any name at all. I insisted immediately I would only be known as Sherlock. I had despised the name since the first time I realized that the syllables so infused with hatred and despair meant myself, it was not part of me, it was part of myself I could give to the world and never regret losing. My name would protect me from ever becoming a true part of this world, from ever forgetting myself within it.

Silent eyes went to the boy I had long thought of as my mute songbird. I expected nothing but there was a look upon his face of serene concentration, his face had always, at least to me, betrayed his every thought.

My mouth was agape in shock before he ever opened his own mouth.

"Alessandro." As crisp and clear as a bell the name flowed from him as if he had spoken every day of his life. The master only nodded, not knowing the history that lay behind us, the monumental feeling of the occasion. Our meeting ended quickly, each of us having someplace to be.

We were alone together, stopped only steps away from parting ways, me to my lab him to class with the others.

"Is that name real?" I asked after a long moment in the English I always slipped into around him. He gave me a smile and took a deep breath, pushing his hair carelessly from his eyes as the sunlight played on the ground at our feet.

"It is real enough." He answered in Italian so perfect that it would make me believe he had never ventured outside of the churches and museums of Naples.

That was the first time I understood how you could choose a new life regardless of your past, that all you had to do was chose and find a new place to call home and then nothing else mattered at all.


	13. Chapter 13

I was happy in my own way, in the idea that I was occupied, that my every moment was filled with music and logic which seemed to come without end, that I never had a spare wasted moment to dwell on life itself. For weeks my nights had been occupied exclusively by the new show, as promised the moment the last show ended I was cast as the lead of its successor. My rivals must have been anguished but I did not see it, I never saw anyone but my teachers. I was so unlike the others in likeness and studies that I never had to spare them a thought, never had to see myself as one of them.

I picked up the nuances of theater as if I was born for it. The costumes and makeup were a wonder, from the very first moment I was enamored. I never imagined how simple it was to transform yourself into someone new, the way a powder or a wig had the power to wipe your face from someone's memory. In the proper clothing with the right makeup I could have walked past anyone in the world and they could not recognize me. Theater gave me a freedom I had not imagined possible.

I dove into the costumes with fervor, choosing many of my own outfits for the play at hand, learning to do my own makeup, toying with different paints to achieve different effects. I could hide my harsh features in the image of a woman, I could wither and be an old man limping through the city, I could be the man I never grew to be. Again without intending to do so I had alienated myself from the others, while they shared a room to be dressed and painted I went off alone to play in shadows.

I remember the night with perfect clarity, the same kind of crystalline memory as the night in the woods. I was lost in a haze of information, seeing but not observing, floating through every experience with the detachment of an animal. I had an hour or so before I was needed so I had lingered outside watching the bearded men my own age work to rebuild an older section of one of the buildings. They were always a fascination for me, with all my knowledge they would always have a comprehension I could never hope to achieve.

My songbird, Alessandro as he was known now, came in his silent manner with the stern face he wore when there was no one else to observe him. He slipped his hand into mine and for a moment we stood together watching, studying like children pressing their faces to glass cages. He led me backstage, his eyes telling me to remain quiet and so we slipped in, the two rising stars hiding like ghosts among the ensemble.

We watched in silence as the boys attempted their makeup, as they laughed and sang and showed off for one another, their eyes politely diverting from me as if I were not just socially awkward but possessed some disfiguring injury they could not help but ogle. His hand tightened in mine and I watched the boys shift, they moved from the makeup and they were removing their street clothing.

I heard Alessandro gasp beside me.

I felt my heart thunder in my chest as if I was running for my life, as if we were the little boys running through the forest in rural England, the leaves whipping our faces, the last boys screams heady in our ears.

My hand crushed his. Two monsters in a room of children.

I had assumed.

I never imagined.

They were castrati. We were monsters.

* * *

I am sure that being a medical man you knew from the moment I spoke of the injury the abnormality which I discovered only years later in that singular moment. My captors had been butchers beyond my original comprehension, so untrained and ignorant that even the most basic elements of the operation escaped them. It had been years at that point since I had truly thought of them, since I thought not of the unemotional fact in an abstract, but the story itself, my personal tragedy and all the repercussions it had wrote on my life.

In that moment I wanted to reach into my past and scream and rage anew, to abandon all the elusive frigidity with which I had surrounded myself in. But I was trapped in devastated silence. Frozen in shadow.

I watched from the back of the room with something akin to horror and shame as the boys disrobed without an ounce of bashfulness, as they revealed their naked organs, as I saw my people, the castrati of Italy, intact. Without the natural flood of hormones their organs remained malformed, childlike even, but they lay sleeping against their legs, this strange organ dangling which I could almost remember the feel of. Their scars had healed, seamless, like dolls they seemed to me, their clean soft flesh.

I stared quite abdominally, should a single pair of eyes ventured to my face at that moment they would have seen murderous rage and the darkest despair. I looked on them and saw only healed scars where their testis had once resided, their mutilations hidden behind a rod of untouched natural flesh. I saw them, the operations they had suffered, but what I observed, all I could think of ,was the mutilated stump of scar tissue which I had been left.

We kept our discovery a secret. We never breathed a word of it to anyone, not out of a sense shame but because more than ever we were not a part of these people. I had imagined that these boys who interacted so naturally with one another and appeared so unscarred from their trials had suffered the same fate as I had, that my companion and I were simply different from nature or nurture. To find out that the great part of our mutilation and torture was for nothing, a torment shared by no one, was like finding myself again on the outside of humanity. More than ever the mask I was creating was relevant to my very survival.

With this discovery more and more of my thoughts became poisoned by the reality in which I lived. I could not focus on my studies, on the music floating perpetually through my mind. To the outside observer I never flagged, never let my work suffer, my voice never dropped from its ethereal pitch. It was in the minutes it took to walk from one room to another, the endless seconds that ticked by during meals and the endless sleeplessness as I lay my head down at night.

I could not escape my own mind. Even with as much knowledge as I could consume at my disposal I could feel the dark mindlessness of black stagnation threatening to engulf me.

If I had ever been allowed to choose what to do with my life, given the facts and made to examine what would become of me I might have chosen this existence. A life of purely intellectual pursuits, a reality never void of the music that had kept me sane as a child, it seemed perfect for me.

But I had not chosen it.

No matter how many aspects appealed to me I felt forced into every moment. As if the very music I longed for was suffocating me. As if even as I walked the open streets I was a prisoner held in the cruelest state of affairs.

Time passed in its slow crawl, but each day melded into the next and it was all I could do to keep my head above the water, to keep from drowning in my own depravity and keep the carefully blank mask on my too expressive face.

As I strived off stage to learn what I could from the others, to formulate a face of normality, on stage I was taught to act. I learned the way to school my face, to portray certain emotions when inside I felt nothing, the way that the right pose, the subtle quark of an eyebrow was the difference between malice and love, the set of my lips the line between despair and euphoria.


	14. Chapter 14

I was by this point sixteen years old and in the midst of extreme inner turmoil, as I imagine all boys of this age must be. The more chained I felt the stronger the desire hide these feelings became. To inadvertently show my cards was in my mind the most horrific of self betrayals. It was in this sorry state that I opened my first show, my little school opera with the seating for a thousand and the lights bright enough to blind. It is hard to explain the experience of being in theater, the smell of greasepaint, the sound of the crowd lingering just behind the curtain of thick red velvet, the controlled chaos lingering just out of view of the audience hiding in the darkness. But even without the gift of words that naturally adept authors posses, and without any of the flair that pollutes the tales of my adventures I will try to explain. The most efficient way, in more than one connotation, to describe my career on the stage is to say that it was unforgettable.

I will never forget standing alone on the huge stage dressed in colors a peacock might be envious of, with so much paint on my cheeks that my closest confidant could not disconcert my features. I was not myself in the moment the curtain raised and the crowd fell into silence, I was a prop created and painted for the stage. All the thoughts of my life seemed to fade from me, as distant as the pages of a long forgotten book. The music was soft and rising around me, encircling me. It was a piece I knew well, my fingers danced the pattern out against my leg wishing for my violin. It was without thought or effort that the first notes sang from my lips, silencing the last rustle of life from the crowd. As if I had the power to kill them with a word.

It rose over the audience, filling the chamber, sweet and high and resonating within some deep nameless part of myself. The musicians twisted and trilled and played sweet harmonies and every note seemed to build mine, to urge me forward. It was not as if my life had been building to this moment, it was nothing like the accumulation of a life's work, it was letting the world know what I had known all along.

I have until this point managed to describe my voice only in the most basic of terms, to elude more to the pitch and range then the tone or quality of the sound. I could recount the reviews I received, the praise showered on me by critics, but I have always found the praise of others to be paltry, what should I care what people without any talents of their own think of mine? Again I find my ability to describe in the romantic way you so favor lacking, how can I hope to describe what was once such an integral part of me accurately? Is it enough to say that the sound was clear as crystal and water, that I disappeared into sound and ceased to exist in the mental realm from which I rarely wander, that those listening held their breaths in order to miss not a single heartbeat of sound?

The song was created to capture attention, to make the heart stop. The last powerful notes where enough to make my body shake, and as they drifted away from me I felt shattered and empty. The audience roared, rising to their feet their cries and faces both magnificent and monstrous as I stared helplessly into their writhing mass of bodies. When the cries refused to be damped, when they cried not for the next song, the next scene, but for more, again, I turned from them, the stage lights leaving me near blind, searching the wings for the others, willing them to continue the show. With the end of the song my mind began returning to me, my own private horrors creeping into my mind.

It should have been a sweet chorus of voices, the school of castrati that came in answer to my song but the crowd was too loud, we could not hear the melancholy wail of the violins, the dulcet tones that should have crept from the pit. A single voice broke through the din, a single voice to my rescue, erasing my mind and giving me back the character I played, reminding me of the paint and costume I wore. My mute songbird, my Alessandro led the way on stage, the silent boys following his childs voice, letting him lead them until the audience dropped into silence and the music ruled once more.

The opera carried on without a flaw, I never again felt the creeping panic of those first moments. For those hours I was nothing more or less then the character I played, I listened to their applause as if they were nothing more than the crashing of waves on the shore. It was not for me that they cheered, it was for the voice without a body that they longed for.

The moment the opera closed, my voice still echoing in the distant corners, hands closed over my arms. The masters were holding me, tugging me into their embraces, crying out to one another, to me, but I understood none of it. I let them manipulate me, let them replace my costumes with fine clothing, let them wipe the worst of the makeup from my face, stripping away my mask and leaving only me. All the while they whispered, laughing spontaneously as if they could hold no more joy and should they try it would erupt from them in an explosion of mirth.

There was a party following the show, in theater there is always a party. I was the rising star of the night, the guest of honor overshadowing everyone, this night it would be I of whom they spoke, I who drew the eyes of the crowd even without my costumes and paint. We arrived in torrents, smelling of stage paints and perfumes to mingle with the upper fringes of society as if artists and performers ranked high in society for a single day of the month. Figures of politics and foreign theater decorated the room like glistening jewels from foreign lands, old men surrounded themselves with beautiful young boys, thick old hands glancing across supple flesh, banking on the exploited dreams of children to warm their nights. Women aged and withered like a burnt photograph glared at their youthful counterparts, their bejeweled hands eager to ensnare and crush the dreams they had long ago lost for themselves.

All of the demons of three worlds come together in a single room and each painted to absolute perfection, fallen angels masquerading as cherubs.

The moment I passed through the gilded doorway a low murmur filled the room, the sound spreading like a wildfire until the world seemed filled with it, silence lost in the torrent of whispers. Groping hands froze in place, cold hearts turned to me and I knew at once that I had again stolen their hearts. I did not need to create a persona for these people to examine, I could tell as I looked into their hollow eyes that it was enough to see me, to hear my voice. The rest they would make up for themselves.

At first it was like a numbing dream, the kind in which nothing matters, the kind where acting is enough and thought is superfluous. I was led through the rooms like a puppet on a string, twirled for their greedy eyes like a mechanical doll. I met the men who forgot their cherub faced boys as soon as it was my hand they could grip with their greasy palms. Men who held such high opinions of themselves that they considered it a bestowing of an honor to anyone they allotted their touch. I learned their titles like names, Advisor of the King, Owner of the Grand Theater Halls of Rome, Richest Man in Spain. But they already knew mine, they called it out as I approached as if my mutilation was a term of endearment.

'Sherlock!'

'Castrato!'

Even as my mind revolted I nodded and smiled like a well trained pet, ever the actor, the perfect porcelain puppet made to dance for the crowd, manipulated by adept hands. Telling the story I realize how shameful it sounds, how grotesque the suppression of my natural character appears, but to me none of this could cause me any injury. It was just another fact of my life, just like the way I would never grow a shadow of coarse hair on my face or the way I would never grow in the proportions of men. It was not me shaking their hands, it was the castrato, the singer with the perfect voice that made men weep. In words more eloquent then my own, all the world is a stage and we but actors in it.

It was in fact the women with whom I suffered the most. I do not know if you had observed but during the course of my story, my life, I was never in the company of women. Since my mother died on the very day I came into this world I had been sequestered into the company of men. I saw them in the street, I understood their anatomy, their place in society, I knew them in theory well enough to portray them on stage, but in practice I knew nothing of them.

When their thin white hand stretched out to me I hated the way their skin was soft as mine, I hated their clean hairless faces, their high cheek bones, their high sweet speaking voices which I knew hid a natural soprano should they choose to sing. I hated how much I was like them. I began to categorize the natural weaknesses of their sex and in their faults I began to find my own. Even in the warm glow of this rich decadence they appeared thin and frail, as if a harsh word would break the weakest of them. When I saw their sinewy frames and pale skin in contrast to their tanned and hardy companions I felt a deeper shame tinge my cheeks. Already I had been created to be weak, to be subservient to the unmutilated man, elevated to a certain esoteric section of society and stagnant in my place. What if I was more like these suppressed creatures than I had imagined? What if their futures represented my own?

Even the strongest of the women, the hardiest and strongest of character were subservient to their husbands in the end, to the society which reined them in and kept them under lock and key the way it held me. I held the fragile hands of broken spirits and saw in their lives a past of unsolicited abuse, partners to the men with cruelty in their eyes and wandering hands. If I was sold to the highest bidder, my contract wrote, and my prison warden as cruel as these men would this half existence be my fate? Being nearly in the condition of a women would I have the strength to survive it any better than the worst of them?

And still I smiled and agreed and let them imagine what my next opera would be or how I would look if they could take me home. It was not long before my keepers and guides to society were distracted and taken away from my side by request or need for drink, when they looked into my false smile they saw no reason to worry.

I do not know if I would have had the initiative at the right moment had a wayward hand not fallen to my hip and a deep growling voice not whispered in my ear, Member of Parliament. It took the span of time for him to set down a drink for me to disappear into the crowd. Once you learn how you never forget how to disappear, how to be invisible.

Within the minute I was breathing the fresh air and wandering down the streets blissfully void of people. I wandered without any destination in mind, my feet taking me down the darkest paths, the places where no one I knew could find me, where no one would want to follow. The streets looked different in the light of day, all the legitimate business covering up the grimiest of actions and making the seedy underbelly of the city seem almost bourgeois. Now the glit of the day had faded and a kind of grimy reality remained.

I saw the men lingering outside of a dark doorway almost a block before I reached them. I should have turned away or at the very least turned into the shadows but I was wild with the adrenalin of escape, with the future I perceived to be hanging over me. I walked boldly on as the smell of cheep tobacco filled my nostrils and the amiable chatter between the men faded and died away leaving a hostile silence in its wake. The men were straightening, seeming to grown in size rather than just stretch out their muscular limbs when I walked into the pool of light in which they lingered.

"Holmes!" One of the men lost the air of rugged danger and let out a little laugh as he stepped forward. "Is that you?" He clapped a hand on my shoulder and brought me into the circle of men, a smile on his familiar face.

"This is that genius lab assistant I was telling you about, making me look bad. It is a great loss to the sciences that he is training in music. Violin isn't it?" He asked turning to me, a look of camaraderie on his face. "I would have blown up the lab last week if he had not been there to help me stop the reaction." I gave him my first genuine smile of the evening.

"An exaggeration." I paused, looking over the men who, while no less gruff, looked more at ease. "It would have blown up the table at very worst."

He laughed again and seemed to look over my outfit for the first time. Working with him as students in the lab I would wear simple attire betraying nothing of my status at the school. The clothes I had on then were too fine, too ornate to belong. I watched as his eyes squinted. I betrayed nothing, waiting for him to come to his own conclusions.

"Are you wearing eye kohl?" He laughed heartily, his breath smelled of cheep beer but he could not have had more than three judging by his speech and fine motor skills. With a kind hand he did up my coat, hiding the almost ludicrous shirt I wore beneath it. "What do they teach you over there, how attract trouble and lose your purse?"

"I have absconded from a function." I said when too long had passed without words, not wanting to appear the lost child that I felt. He grinned at me. He was only a few years older than myself with intelligent eyes and a keen mind, he would be more than capable as a chemist once his studies were completed.

"Good lad. Well, there is nothing for it then. You will come with me and I will show you how the rougher half live."

The smell as we descended through the hidden back door of a nondescript building is one I will never forget. At least two dozen different types of tobacco rose around me like a hazy cloud, each step taking on a new fragrance, each twisted trail of smoke its own hue of blue grey, each matching its consumer as surely as a fingerprint. The old wooden stairs creaked as if they would shatter beneath our weight but the alcohol sodden wood held as the roar of men rose in my ears a hundred times more real than the crowd I had abandoned in my palace of gilded poison. The dust and dirt of the floor rose around us with the scuffle of feet, coating my face as I breathed in the darkened air as if it was my first taste of life, deeply and with a smile I could not suppress as my companions arm gripped tight around my shoulders.

"Come closer!" He shouted in my ear and I could barely hear the familiar strands of his voice as he pressed a cold bottle of cheap ale into my pristine hands. We pushed our way through men, thick and grimy, their skin so saturated with debris that they could have originated in the darkest parts of Africa rather than the cultured streets I had come to know. The thick smell of sweat lingered in the air, something sour and sweat at once, something masculine that set my teeth on edge and had my blood pounding through my veins at the first swallow of burning alcohol. They pressed against me, their bodies slick with sweat as they roared and pressed harder to the wooden circle in the center of the room that my companion edged us towards.

I bristled at the first touch as if they might from a passing glance know what I was, that the most fleeting touch of my smooth skin would betray me and this room of men would turn on me and know what I was as surely as the crowd that still cheered at the sound of my name . But they moved against me, pushing and shoving and filling my every sense and they never turned on me with knowing eyes, a man with alcohol saturating his shirt and his breath turned and pulled me into a rough half embrace as a cheer filled the crowd and the fear left me absolutely. Without a word I had become one of them, one of a jeering crowd of men, nothing more or less.

We reached the edge of the ring and I took another swig of alcohol, feeling it burn through my veins, filling my empty stomach. We watched as two bloodied men left the ring. One with the aid of two men, their arms slung under his arms, carrying his limp bulk from the dirt in which it lay. By the time two more entered the ring, their clothes stripped to the barest of essentials, their well developed muscles and slight bellies glistening with sweat the bottle I held felt too light and I wondered fleetingly as another was pressed into my hands where the contents had gone. They circled each other as the men around me roared as if it were they in the ring, some held slips of paper in their hands and I could see across the ring a man taking bets, a thrill went through me as out of the corner of my eye I saw the thick punch of flesh meet flesh for the first time.

They attacked each other without finesse, as if they were no more base then the animals roaming the woods with bestial calls. They spat blood as it pooled in their mouths, bruises purpled and then blackened in front of my eyes and I saw firsthand the brutal strength of men, not the sick torment of men holding down the weak but fury verses fury, a strength I imagined I could never have. Muscles rippled and I examined with a keen eyes the way they dances, like the dancers upon the more gracious stage, each flaw resulting in the most brutal of punishments, each well executed swing ending in the most spectacular of blows. A dance in which the victor survived and the weak crawled into obscurity only to crawl out again and try their new tactics as if fate had never dealt them an ill hand.

Another bottle entered my hand and the laughing cries of my companion fell on mute ears I watched them swing with wild abandon, never thinking, creatures of base instinct, fueled by fury and testosterone. I began to see the moves that they failed to see in split seconds of a heartbeat, I saw in their emotionally fueled wild swings what could be accomplished with the detached intellect in combination with a well tuned body. Each blow ripped at my raging emotions, tore at my heart so set on perfection at this new game laid out before me like a brilliant game of human chess. I yearned to see them move as I would have them move, to protect and rage with such efficiency as to render an end to these games completely, to take the betting and intuition out and replace them with statistics and fact, each motion a carefully planned maneuver, a dance in its own right.

Another man fell, blood spilled beneath his open mouth in a pool of red in which I saw a weakness reflected in my past that I never wanted to repeat. As they dragged him free, the crimson staining his face and dripping down his chest they called for another fighter, a man to go against the winner of the night, a brutal goliath with arms as thick as a normal mans leg, a face so familiar with brutality that every featured seemed to be twisted into brutal masculine perfection.

The third or fourth bottle fell from my hand as I called out. A hand fell on my shoulder in an attempt to restrain me but it was as insignificant to me as the breeze. I cried out again and the referee laughed at my angelic face, at the kohl around my eyes, my fine coat and young look.

The crowd erupted and I knew they looked forward to a massacre but I let the me drag me to the side, strong arms lifting me from my place of safety and to the side of the ring, away from the abandoned yells of my brilliant companion. I found myself pushed into a dingy backroom where men more sober than myself laughed, and took my clean coat, my ruffled shirt. They only laughed harder as I revealed pale naked flesh, the flatness of my stomach, the smooth lithe arms which struggled with the claps at my wrists. When I was stripped down to my finely tailored pants and ornate shoes they pushed me back out into the undiminished cry of the drunken men, straight into the wooden circle which held only my own sweet goliath.

I saw for a moment the room as a whole, I saw the excited bloodthirsty gazes of the men who I so envied with their easy existence, their endless monotony. I saw the petrified face of my fellow lab assistant as he begged and pleaded with the referee, and then I had eyes only for him. He was two or three times my own size, his muscles gleaming in the lamp light. I could smell the dust and sweat and blood that saturated the pit, still see the pools of darkened ground that marked the spots in which my predecessor had fallen.

The first punch fell, wild and to straight forward, judging me, watching my reaction. I dodged with ease, letting his blow fall short as I jumped back, the crowd let out its first hiss of disappointment. I looked into my eyes for the first time; beady eyes squinted and hazed, obviously in the midst of a drug haze. I dodged another half hearted punch as the fury within him built.

Memories of old articles rose in my mind, stories of drugs, chemical compounds and murders. It was when his first punch landed viciously against my ribs that I realized he could not feel a thing. I Rolled as I fell to the ground, bounding to my feet, I could barley take a breath as a fist made contact with my cheek. It was a glancing blow, almost more luck then skill but it was enough to send my thin body across the ring, to thrust me into the splintered unforgiving wood.

He spat on the ground with a drugged smirk as I pushed from the side. A confident fist aimed at the center of my chest and I managed to dodge away, landing a harsh blow against his skull but he came at me like it was nothing, laughing when I could see the blood rise to the surface, when I could count the types of tissue that should have been in agony, hot like the bruises on my own body.

Behind me the smoke was almost too thick to see through, or at least that is how it felt when each breath was sucked in through bruised ribs and burned within me as I ran around the ring, not dodging but avoiding altogether.

I coughed and blood filled my mouth, I was choking on it, it was all I could do to spit it up on the ground when he collided with me, when a blow cracked against my skull with a sound that reverberated through my body and sent a cry throughout the room.

I fell to the ground. I could taste the dust in my mouth, feel the blood seeping from me, and I thought, this is it; I will never be able to protect myself, never be strong enough to be my own master.

And I heard him laughing. His thick laugh betraying no intelligence, no wit or brilliance, I heard him pause, felt the moist thick film of spit on the back of my neck, felt it drip down my body like every inch was a defilement.

I rolled onto my knees, to my feet, the world spinning around. He continued to laugh and I knew what he saw, the tiny boy before him with the soft feminine body.

I saw it in my mind before he took a step to finish me. The limp I had noticed in his previous bout, the way he cocked his head to the side when the referee spoke, the scar tissue than ran along his neck and face and crossed to his left eye. He stepped and like a dance I countered him, stepping around him, my hands coming flat against his ears, dancing back before he could even scream. He lashed out, his thick prominent right arm coming out in a show of power, easy to step into his blind spot just to the left, to thrust the heal of my hand into his liver, another to his kidney, to send him spiraling to the ground with his own power. Easy to spike my hand into his neck, to crush scar tissue and send the signals to his brain to shut him down. No pain necessary. Total annihilation.

I stood panting in the middle of the ring, my hand slimy with the mucus coating the back of my neck, his limp body face first into the oblivion of the bottom of the ring.

The crowd stilled, a deathly silence coming over them and I imagined I had done it again, broken the mold in which I belonged, betrayed the social graces I could not understand.

A heartbeat passed in which I could hear the sound of my own breath, the pounding of the blood in my ears, and they erupted. Every man seemed to explode with the same giddiness my masters displayed hours before with a grounded reality which endeared them to me. It was an instantaneous kind of explosion, a hundred groping hands on my flesh, a dozen voices in my ear plying for my attention. They were not the wandering hands of perverted men, not the fragile embrace of women, it was the hold of the earth beneath my feet, the cry of uncomplicated joy.

I tasted a dozen cigarettes, memorizing the flavor, the smoke, the burn of each, tasting brews that would linger and burn on my tongue as men regaled me with tales of their own pasts, false and magnificent and it did not seem to matter at all which lay in the realms of reality. I fell back into the embrace of my fellow and heard his unrestrained joy at my success, his embarrassing relief, his promises to bring me back into this world, to show me the world of the sensational literature, the stories of men and women worse than mine, to meet the people who occupied my mind with their problems so much more than the trivial paltry investigations of the bored rich.

That night I met my first contacts into the underworld, the pawn brokers and barkeeps, I met the first of the boys lingering in the shadows who would become my irregulars. The night which was suppose to be my birth into the world of church and theater and my first foray into the upper class was my awakening into the world which would inspire my infamous career.


	15. Chapter 15

The masters were furious with the black bruises that painted my pale skin but makeup could cover the worst of it, no worse than the beaten women I so feared, and my ribs did not fair so poorly that my performance would be hindered. In fact I performed admirably on stage the very next night, and the night after that.

I was affronted by a barrage of offers to be whisked away, to be a private entertainer to kings and rich men, to the operas of foreign lands, but I was settling into my new residence and my masters were eager to keep me as a pupil.

The time I had recently spent dwelling on my past, on my downfalls and the situation I found myself were diminished when I took up boxing as my new occupation. It was not long before even in this I found suitable teachers to fill my time. Once again the time I spent drifting into sleep at the end of my days or wandering to class was spent analyzing a particularly complicated move or the resonance of a new sonata.

I filled every moment of my time, collecting information on these topics as if there was no end to me. With my new companions I was able to disconcert the differences between classes and occupation, the lilt of one accent from another. I learned how to fit in to each group as if I belonged when in truth I belonged nowhere. It got to the point where I was as comfortable in my costumes in my opera as I was in the lab or the library or the fighting ring. I did not exist as I do now with you. It was as if I was somehow asleep, walking through life, only preparing for what was next.

Years passed in this place, in this manner. It is not to say that nothing ever changed or that opportunities did not present themselves to me, but I was content. Through my connections in the boxing ring was able to procure simple lessons in marksmanship and fencing and each round in the ring I became faster, I learned how to use my lanky and awkward body with such proficiency that I was turning awkwardness into elegance. Almost nightly I would perform on the stage, the rising start of Naples, the boy who stole the voice of the angels. I would steal the hearts of the opera patrons in my gilded hall of painted gold and then sneak into the dark night in my costumes of squalor with dirt painted on my face. My days were filled with lessons and laboratories, I had my own series of experiments and tests running almost continuously, always something new to pursue, I was inspired by the crimes I read, by what caused one man to walk and another to hang. It felt as if I was creating order from chaos.

There are a thousand smaller tales to tell in those years, my first early cases, as paltry as a runaway child, a stolen purse, puzzles I enjoyed playing with. They may have been my very first times at play, these detective games, my first foray into childhood. There were the times I was followed and blackmailed, times when someone set their greedy eyes on me and refused to be put off. But these were mere games to me, I brushed them off as they were nothing, I was, as all youth believe, invincible.

I should also say that even as I grew to understand social interactions my closest personal relationships remained the same. I had accumulated a thousand acquaintances to which I spoke to with varying degrees of interest, but it seems that the first impressions I made at school would stick with me. Alessandro remained the closest thing I had to a true friend, our silences the closest thing I had to not lying just to exist, when we were together the masks which had become automatic fell away and we could breathe when we had not realized we had forgotten how. He had risen almost as rapidly as I had, he became on stage my counterpart, always my love interest, my main advisory, I lived for the moments our voices would rise together and intertwine on stage. The main boy I had replaced in the fickle hearts of the audience remained bitter, he too was aging and the offers I turned down nightly he longed to hear for himself, turning down again and again his fate as a church singer, as a small opera house nobody. He blamed me for his lowered station in life and I cannot say it was not my fault.

The masters protected me from offers beneath me, saying always that with another month I could be the best, that I deserved the best. The other castrati looked on me with wide eyes, as if I was some sort of phantasm, they watching my finely honed muscles and heard my voice in practice and their admiration was paramount to that for the gods.

I was in the main stride of my youth, a man and a boy of eighteen when the whispers became shouts, the operas of England wanted me, a contract for more money in season then most men would make in a lifetime, a fame that would have my name upon the lips of people in countries across the world, a love that would be set into the history books. My time had come.


	16. Chapter 16

I realized what going back to England would mean, to have my image painted upon the walls of the most fashionable bits on London. I would be trading one life for another. Everything that I had gained, the anonymity that I held, my ability to dance through all walks of life, gone. I could not be the singing chemist, the prize fighter, the amateur violinist. I would once and for all choose my life, the life that had been chosen for me. The world would know what I was.

They promised me a life of security, they promised more money than I could imagine, all splendor of the world would be mine at the sacrifice of the common place.

It was decided for me and I agreed. I imagined that in a few years I could take the money I made and finance a new life for myself, I could fund my own experiments; I could create a club for fighters. But even as the thoughts ran through my mind and comforted me I knew they were false. There was a finality to this, as if it would be the last thing I ever decided, as if I would die immersed in the music into which I had been born.

There was only a month left for me in Italy and every moment seemed precious, each breath of clouded chemical fumes tinged with the copper taste of blood tasted sweet. The men around me spoke of months and years and I was thinking of the span of days, how to end a life with only weeks left to exist. Every faction of my life hinged suddenly on the opera, when the current show closed and I took my final bow I would leave and never look back.

I know I speak as if the opera meant nothing to me, as if it was a means to end, some loathsome task that I performed in order to exist but such could not be further from the truth. Each moment in the light of the stage I burned with a passion unmarked by words, I adored the actors' life, the false laughter, the comfort of knowing every event, every nuance before it happened, the play of words, the soaring of my own voice with instruments played by savants. But the opera was not held it the high regard of the easily lost, it was in fact the only part of my life I did not fear losing. I enjoyed every moment but when the rest of my life held bittersweet longing of the soon to end it seemed foolish to adore every moment as if it was the last when soon it would be the only part of me that remained.

As the days ticked by I let my experiments come to a natural end, I left extensive notes on the next steps I would have taken in hopes that one of the others might pick up what I had left off. The field of criminal study always seemed so invaluable and yet untouched, I dreamed of someone discovering so many ways to define a crime that no one would dare touch a child, that murder would be a risky endeavor instead of a sure thing. My lessons finished and lapsed and in my own way I let my associates know that I would be leaving Naples, leaving them with the lingering impression that I was nothing but a wanderer passing through and grateful for their time. My things where packed and shipped ahead of me, my room left barren the night before my final show, as if I had never been there at all.

My every activity had been taken away, packed into boxes; even my violin was miles away from me. For almost four years I had filled my every moment with action and now on the eve of the end I found myself without a single activity to cloud my thoughts. I took to the streets, wandering through the bright wide common places that appeared on postcards and through the alleys that had become not a place of mystery but the cobblestone on which I lingered watching creatures as dark as I wander by. I had been wandering for hours when I felt it, the twinge in my gut.

I had become cocky; I believed no ill could befall me in this place, deep within the embrace of my adoptive city. I had no idea how long the figure in the corner of my eye had been shadowing my every move. I wandered casually back to the well populated streets, shifting through markets and screaming children, hoping to double back and catch a glimpse of my shadow but he was intelligent, never letting himself be cornered, never allowing more than the most cursory of glances to fall over him. Mentally I shifted through the list of people who might be after me, long enough had passed that I could push back thoughts of abduction and the rush of blood, but every name I came up with seemed more likely than the last. My stalker was getting closer, I could glimpse the dark cloth with which he had swathed himself, his face obscured so that even if I could reach out and touch him I would not know him. His walk and stance told me nothing, neither was familiar to me and I felt a rush of regret for not spending more time analyzing the gates of men.

Time was against me but the terrain was familiar, I abandoned the streets and fell into alleys, always keeping just ahead. I would ambush him, use surprise to disarm him and rely on my hard earned skills to protect me. I was such a child that I believed I could take down anyone given the right circumstances, that every failure would end not in death but another chance.

I turned a corner and scaled the fence I knew lay just the right, taking the high ground I would jump on him the moment he came around, take him down and reveal him to me.

A swish of blue appeared and I leapt like a giant cat of prey, aiming for where I hoped his arm would be in a moment's time. But he twirled out of the way, instead of soft yielding flesh I fell into the unforgiving stone of the street, my wrist screaming its anguish as I sacrificed it to keep my feet. I attempted to dart away from the man but a blow to my neck sent me to the ground. Blood filled my mouth as I turned my body away from him, rolling to safety. I would have tried again had a voice of the fringes of my memories not called out to me in a way that would have sent me crashing to my knees had I not already been brought low.

"Sherlock!"

Blue fell away, pooling at his feet like solid water, as if his presence was so miraculous that the elements themselves yielded to him.

He fell to his knees beside me, familiar grey eyes I had thought taken from me forever devouring me as if it was I who would disappear.

Hands pulled me from the ground, sitting me up as if I were no more substantial than a child. We stared at each other like fools, lost in a pool of dust and blood. Our reunion was one of the most significant moments of our lives spent in foreign alleyway.

"Mycroft."

It is a rare case that I involve my brother even though I have said time and again that his is the most brilliant mind in all on London. For Mycroft I was the one great case of his life, the case that would forever put him off from my profession.

Within a week of my abduction he had found the church to which we had been brought. He found our bloodied altar, the shallow grave holding the body of a small boy; he even followed the trail I had so coarsely plowed through the forest in my botched escape attempt. It was shortly after that my father could no longer endure his ceaseless questions, that Mycroft began to remind him of myself and he was sent away to university as he had told me.

His years at school were spent much as mine were, each moment spent in occupation, save where I filled my time with arts and sciences his spare time was spent in research of me. He learned of pockets of boys being taken, many of them died more horrific deaths than I had witnessed, many succumbing to sepsis, or suicide. Numerous more had no voice to speak of, not an ounce of talent to justify their mutilation. Countries were filled with homes like the French monastery I had spent my youth at and each seemed as likely to hold me as the last. His letters were met with blatant denials and even as he spent every school holiday on trips to visit these places he was unsure whether I lived at all.

Academically he is every ounce the Mycroft you have come to know. His brilliance was unparalleled and he finished in years less time than his peers, setting himself up in London with a job in the government he had thought at the time would be temporary. It allowed him access into files of great security and an ear to the establishments whose gears he believed still held me.

After all of his work it was an accident by which he heard of me at long last. This was years before he had established his odd club and still lingered in the social circles of the commonplace government official. He was known as a man of rising importance and many were eager to show off for him. It was at an obligatory club visit by which he kept his contacts close enough to talk that one such man, previously damned as useless, bragged of a recent trip to Italy. Mycroft knew the likelihood of my ending up in Italy and had made several trips as a university student but had yet to make it back. It was in a rowdy room of half inebriated men showing off their poker face that he heard of a boy in Naples with a voice worthy of murdering for, a boy secreted away but the masters by the name of Sherlock.

I tell you all of this in a calm manner, safe in our rooms without time pressing against us but I learned these things whispered in that dirty alleyway. Years compressed into seconds and realties brought crashing, absolute certainties disproved and upsetting the very foundation upon which I had set the basis of my personality and subsequent life. He offered me a new life, anything I should choose. He would find a place for me to live, he would put me through university, use his influence to buy me a past and a future if I wanted something different. He offered me the world I had assumed permanently out of my grasp on the eve I was to commit myself to another and all in the span of a single hurried breath.

I begged time of him even when I knew he could provided none as my own deadline was that very night. He would have given me the very stars themselves if it was within his power to do so and so he accepted when I insisted on wandering on alone but he begged me, my great brother begged for the first and very last time in his life, for me to meet with him again that night regardless of my decision. I believe he felt and still does to some degree that my fate was on his shoulders and while he held every affection for the little brother he had not seen in years he felt as if his success was only at the cost of my own tragedies. He had escaped our father unscathed because I had not.

When I returned to the streets clutching my wrist and mindless with promises of returning that night I no longer observed the world around me, no longer saw the people or their intentions. I failed to do what I demand of you every time we leave our rooms. Hours had passed in my wandering and subsequent chase and curtain call was fast approaching. No matter what I planned for the future I would perform that night, It would be the last time my voice rang out in the theater I had learned in, the city which had bent to me, it could even be the last time I ever sang the way I was created to do.

Naples held a certain magic for me in those minutes, even as I tried to make the decision that would form the rest of my life I could not shake the feeling that it would be the last time I ever saw those streets. I could not block out the smell of the flowers I had so often walked past, the sound of voices speaking in a language which had never ceased to be beautiful. I walked into the old theater through the back entrance as I always did, walking through familiar hallways, not needing to memorize anything but wanting to. I walked past the open door of where the other boys changed, I could hear their excitement, their laughter, as I walked by I chanced a look in and saw Alessandro, the mute companion of my childhood, our eyes locked and he smiled, not the one that he gave the others but something small and half broken and real. And then the moment was gone, a flash of a second I would not remember until weeks later in the darkness of my own room.

It had been during the very first show that I created a separate changing room for myself, a place of silence and solitude in which I could practice hiding the scars from my fights, hide my mutilations without effort or shame. I walked alone down the darkened corridor, utterly lost in thought in a way I had never been, never allowed myself to be. I was trying to make a decision when I had never allowed myself to think of what I wanted.

I did not know I was not alone until I reached out for the handle and I heard the creek of a poorly made shoe on the ground behind me. I did not realize the danger I was in until something hard whipped into the back of my skull.

Then I knew nothing.


	17. Chapter 17

The interval between falling unconscious and waking could not have been more than a few minutes. We were still in the same building, an abandoned back room, the walls littered with pieces of old sets, forgotten costumes collecting dust and fading into undistinguished grey. The music that saturates the building when we perform was still silent, somewhere in the distance I could hear the low roar of the crowd mulling about, comparing seats and outfits as if they were personal attributes. Somewhere out there was the man from England who had extended the contract to me, waiting to see me for the first time before taking me away from here.

I had been tied inexpertly to an old wooden chair, a prop more than a piece of furniture, facing the back wall with my captors pacing noisily behind me. Two men and a third sound, something inhuman joined their rapping, a cane. I tried to pick up my head to turn to them but a rolling nausea filled me, spreading from my stomach to the very ends of my being as if my organs and muscles had rotted away under my skin. My head throbbed painfully with every breath I took, making my mind spin, my thoughts a shattered mess on the floor of my skull and the existence of the cane no longer seemed so paltry a fact.

Minutes ticked by and every second seemed to bring my captors into a higher state of agitation, I could hear them stop, the lighter one first and the heavier one with the cane in response.

"What if it does not work?" His voice was young, nervous, maybe a few years younger than me but already his voice had dropped in a way mine never would.

"He is the best, he only needs a chance without this one in the way. It will work." Older, middle aged, afflicted, his voice seemed heavy, weighed down even when the adrenalin in his body should have woken some reserve of energy within him. For a second I believed they might be speaking of my Alessandro, the best singer in Naples after me, the star whom waited in my shadow, but the thought was erroneous, I let it wash away from me in a flood of pain.

"And if they come looking for him? What will we do?" I stayed very still, every motion threatened to blacken my vision, every ounce of my strength was being used and taxed to keep the acid in my stomach from spilling past my lips. I tried to focus on facts, on the situation around me. The way my swollen wrist was tied less tight then my other arm, as if my captor had not wanted to hurt me, the way the two voices had parallel attributes, father and son perhaps.

"Stop!" The cane rapped harshly against the floor and I flinched, acid rose in my throat as the sound triggered a thousand memories, as the physical motion rippled anguish through my body. "We will do what we must to give your brother a chance." He must have made a face, some silent expression of panic because the cane smacked against flesh this time, the sharp stinging hit that burns more than injures. "Sacrifices must be made. He will save us all."

The younger let out a hiss of pain, a whimper. They passed closer to me. I could smell the clinging musk of cheap tobacco on their clothes, a particularly poor mix from a little shop in a poor part of town where overpopulation and wretchedness were as catching as a virus. Now I could make out the accent, the peculiarities of tone and annunciation that labeled them as surely as the clothes I could not see. A spark of familiarity and understanding flashed through my Cro-Magnon brain, pushing through the miasma that paralyzed me.

I coughed, I let my breath grow harsh and labored, let the pain seem to fill me until the younger panicked, until a white hand fell on my breast and an almost familiar face swam in my vision. It was in his soft watery eyes, in his light hair as wispy and insignificant as a ray of milky sunshine, in the softness of his features. The younger brother of the misplaced lead.

I had taken away their hope to escape the slums. I had replaced their child in the eyes of the world and made his sacrifice useless.

They were going to kill me.

If there had been even the slimmest chance of them releasing me it died forever when I saw the boys face. With a sigh the father joined him, not hiding, his eyes almost pitying as they looked on me. He kneeled to my level and through the anguish I saw tinge of yellow where his eyes should have been white, jaundice lingering in his eyes, in the color of his skin. There was an unrelenting hardness under his naturally soft features.

Killing me would be his final act in this life.

Even if I told him his plan could not work he could not believe me.

Acid burned my throat but the coughing subsided, my body slumped into the chair and I let the pounding in my head erase my fears until there was nothing left.

Time passed. We could hear the scurrying feet of boys outside the door, boys calling my name. I tried to call out but bile rose in my throat choking the words before they were sounds. My captors did not appreciate my efforts, forcing a dirty handkerchief into my mouth, the cane whipping down across my thighs and ribs hard enough to leave welts, my blistered skin clinging to my clothing.

Eventually the sound of boys died down and the roar of the crowd became the hushed silence of anticipation.

The swell of music filled our little room, my music. The words filled my head and my lips wanted to form the words in my dizzy mindless oblivion, but blood and dirt and cloth scrapped against my teeth, I was brought back to harsh reality as they laughed, as thick hands clapped, the sound like the crack of bones to my ears. We could not hear the high strains of the singers' voice above my orchestra, above the heart of the music.

My captors embraced, the man so filled with life that he threw his cane to the floor and threw his hands up as if every inch of life they took from me revitalized him. He captured his sons face in his hands, kissing him on both cheeks. The words a mumbling babble pressed against his skin 'We are saved! Saved!'.

He strode out the door with long confident strides, buoyed by their success, his son left smiling in his wake. I calculated the time, the twist of the corridors, the safest place for him to peer into the concert hall and return to finish the deed. I had perhaps five minutes.

I let out a sharp cry as if they had finished me, as if the sound of the music swelling within me was the final blow to an already weak heart. The knots on the rope were too tight, my fingers numb and cold and unfeeling. They could not be undone.

I waited until I saw the panic on his face. I kicked, throwing my weight to the side with all the force I could muster. I watched his face fall in horror as the chair tipped, as I fell.

A sick hollow crack filled the room as I landed, my arm shattered beneath me. His eyes were on my face as at last my nausea overtook me and the scarce contents of my stomach spilled onto the floor, threatening to choke me. He did not see as I pulled the twisted wreck of my arm from the loose bindings, the pain so blinding I could see the blackness closing in the edges of my vision. I coughed and stomach acid burned the side of my face pressed to the ground, blood mixing with bile. My other arm pulled free of the now useless rope.

He never saw me grab the cane from beneath me.

Never saw it coming until he too was thrust into painful oblivion.

I staggered to my feet. My arm hung limply at my side, unmoving. I could not focus on that, I had to go on, no use lingering on what I could not fix. I spared a glance for the boy, his head was close against his chest, pinned by the way he had fallen, and already the soft sounds of choking filled the room. The world was spinning almost uncontrollably, my grip on the cane the only thing keeping me upright and my window of opportunity was closing. Music still filled the room, it was swelling, the end of the first number, my eyes closed and I could see it, the stage lights, feel their heat on my face, I could see the audience, my voice filling the room, a voice without rival or comparison.

The world tilted, the images behind my eyes flickered and the grey walls crashed around me, the boy choking at my feet. I spared him a gentle kick to his side, his body fell flat, his breathing becoming regular as I stumbled out of the room, falling into the wall.

I had taken too long. If I went for the front door, for the theater, for help or anyone I knew he would find me. It would be the end of me. I stumbled for the back, into the depths of the theater, into the abandoned classrooms and forgotten paraphernalia of ages gone by. The halls were empty and dark as I stumbled through them, the sounds of my footsteps echoing, giving me away as the music faded from me.

Colors began to fade from my vision, or perhaps it was the world itself which lacked color. I could focus on nothing but the next step, the next breath of fire that filled my lungs. I was a mindless creature of agony. My mind searched for ways to keep me up, to keep me going. Flashes of memories invaded my world and reality blended with fantasy. One moment I was running through the woods, my limp arm whole and latched to a golden haired child, the next I was running through the fields of my birth, Mycroft calling my name as he showed me the dark places in which to hide. A window swam before my vision, old plate glass so dirty it could have been solid, a painting, a mirage.

The end of the cane and the glass met in explosion of shattered crystal like a gun shot. I could hear the steps behind me now, the rage in those footfalls, the limp pronounced now, his breath flagging. He had let me kill his hope all over again.

I fell more then climbed from the window, crawling through the shards of jagged glass still jutting from the bottom, deep tears ripped into my flesh but I no longer felt anything at all. Red handprints lingered on the sill as I fell into the street below, my clothing saturated in my own blood, seeping from a dozen wounds.

I heard his roar; I could see his beady eyes looking down on me, rage giving his swollen face definition. I had not been the only victim of my existence.

I realized belatedly that I had fallen onto my back and lay on the street staring up at the man who could not fit through the gap I had made and beyond the stars glistened uncaring, detached from the drama so far beneath them. I tried to lift myself but my arm refused to move, I looked over at and almost laughed when I realized I had forgotten what I had done to it. Distantly I thought that it was better that my violin had been sent on to chambers I would never see, I could never hold it again. I pressed my other hand into the dirt, leaving a palm of blood as I stumbled up.

The streets were nearly empty in this nowhere in which I had landed. I estimated I had another minute or two before the man found a way to me, before I destroyed him once and for all with a charge of murder. I did not hear it coming, or rather I did but the sounds no longer made sense in my ravaged mind. The pounding of hooves, the roll of wheels, what were these sounds to me?

I heard a man shout, the cry of frightened horses. I had time to look, to stare death in the face, to see two beasts kick their massive legs out. Their hides glistening white and black in the lamplight.

I fell. I do not know what hit me, man, beast or machine and It did not matter to me. Time was fluid and I believed I had reached my end. I could feel the cold invading my limbs, the warm comforting seep of blood spreading against my skin. There was a familiar face, one I could not place but stretched my lips into a smile, a voice from my earliest dreams calling to me in a way that meant home.

When arms came around me the stars disappeared and I forgot the world.

You have of course, as is your nature, been keeping careful track of my injuries, ticking them off in your head. I could not help but observe the clenching of your hand on the blanket at every major injury spoken, and again a moment later as you process the implications of each.

I believe you have already deduced the circumstances that rendered the next few days a blur in my memory. The concussion that left me confused and nauseous, the blood loss which rendered my situation somewhat dire, the severity of the multiple breaks and fractures in my left arm, the filthy serious lacerations and the resulting widespread infection which took hold of me.

I was in no state to care for myself or interact with the world around me but I understood what was happening in the most basic of ways as I faded in and out of consciousness and memory. I knew I was in my brothers' care.

I knew when I opened my eyes to the bleary world that if I looked out of my sickroom window it would not be the rolling green landscape of Naples lain out before me.

I knew that I had lost, for the last time, my ability to choose my own life.

I regret to say that my first prolonged interaction with my brother in almost a decade was spent in the abyss of the blackest depression. With the abruptness that my life had been taken away from me I had been thrust into an existence without mental stimulation. I was not well enough to read, my classes had been taken away, all of my lessons left miles behind me in a country to which I would not return. But most devastatingly, the sweet escape of music had at last been torn from me.

My arm lay limp and cold in a cast, my violin as far from me as the existence I had known, lost to me forever. And I would not sing, not now. That door had closed for me, the life I could not choose had I wanted to.

I would never sing again.

Like a lark kept in a cage, my voice, my singular comfort, was gone from me.

The antiseptic room in which I stayed had never been a home to anyone, just another in a set Mycroft had taken out of need, four walls, a loveless window overlooking a bland meaningless street. I believe we both wanted those first lucid days I had to be a homecoming, to be a reuniting of brothers, of blood long parted. We had shared a family, a childhood, part of a past, but we were two strangers locked together with identical minds. We shared our lives in the most factual manner possible, a list of facts and classes and occupations more than a true telling, neither of us sure the true manner in which to share. We found in our silences together that we were less human then we were stores of information, logic in biological form. The pursuit of me had been Mycroft's motivation since the moment I disappeared and now that I was within arm's reach he no longer needed to search, no longer needed to linger in the places he found himself. He was as adrift with me found as I was without a world to be in.

He cared for me as best as he could but the darkness so natural in both of us seemed to infect him as it seeped into my bones, making my wounds ache as if they broke afresh each morning. Before I bore even a week of lucid pain the doctor looking in on me daily had begun injecting me with morphine, blaming my mood on infection, on blood and pain.

I found for the first time an escape from the melancholy stagnation.

Mycroft knew what I was doing, how the morphine, the glinting syringe on my bedside table, was not to alleviate any physical pain but he was powerless to help me. Sometimes we are so alike in mind that my actions must have seemed to him transparent, but even as he could understand my need for it, my desire, he found it repellent as you do.

I do not know how much time passed in this manner between the physical weakness and mental anguish in which I indulged my own self-pity. Mycroft at the time had decided that the government route on which he had already placed his life was as suitable as any to his needs. He no longer wanted the travel he had been forced into in his searching for me, the way each new town reminded him of finding little bodies, nameless and without cause. He did not yearn for the confusion and half hazard existence of our youth under the instruction of a man driven half wild.

It was one late night after work, as had become his custom, that he came into my room to check on me, finding me staring at the droplet of blood pooling on my arm. It was with the syringe still shining with blood that he sat down with me, his pale hand awkwardly pressed against mine, that he proved to me that we were both human.

He confided in the milky light of that hopeless room that he chose to stay with the government because no matter how poorly he acted; no matter what he did, it would survive as if he had never touched it. He said that he could not fail something as badly as he had failed me and watch the desolation he had created again.

I began to take courses at the university, Mycroft using his money and influence to get me into place, into the classes I chose, the professors I thought might have something to teach me. I gathered new supplies, new costumes and paints even though not a soul in the city new me and slipped into the dark places of the city which had been chosen for me.

My body was healing well and I did nothing to hinder it, the bottles of morphine and cocaine which I had procured stayed locked away and untouched. All the time Mycroft was growing more important, his job taking more hours from him and I did not want to burden him, to be that dark secret holding him down even if that is never how he saw me.

He offered to take me to his clubs, to meet the people of which he spoke but I always declined, hating as he did the falseness of the politicians, the overfed curves of the well to do. It was a thus a rare occasion that he insisted I dress for the theater rather than the rags I so preferred to haunt the streets in. He spoke nothing of what we were doing but his body language and absolute silence spoke volumes. Repeatedly his eyes strayed to me as if I might at any moment leap from the carriage or faint dead away, searching for a clue in my familiar face. But as we rode up to the doors of the concert hall I felt nothing but a sweet sadness, not a longing as much a taste of nostalgia that you cannot help but allow to wash over you and fill your senses with sensations long gone.

It was strange to enter through the front doors of a theater in the midst of a throng of people, to be part of the mulling crowd take my seat and look up at the stage and not know what was about to come, to not know every syllable and note as if it were my own. I felt that fleeting rush as the people quieted and the first strains of music filled the room, a sweet soft violin that made my heart ache for want of it.

When the first note resonated through the chamber, when I got my first glance at the boy, the man, in center stage, the rising star of London, of all of Europe, I wanted to open my mouth and cheer. My eyes drifted closed as the unfamiliar song washed over me in a voice as close to me as my own.

My songbird.

I drifted, lived in the music, escaped in the sound of his voice as time passed over me and then it was gone. Over. He was looking into the crowd, past it, his chest heaving as we rose to our feet. As we cheered with the crowd, as we loved him as if we knew him.

At the end Mycroft looked at me as if asking if I wanted to see him, if I wanted to tell him. But I only smiled the way I had not been able to do in so long and shook my head, leaving with the crowd, our arms linked like brothers, our grins matching.

That night before we retired Mycroft presented me with a gift. He knew that I resented the money he spent on me, how dependent I was on him for everything but he insisted before I ever opened it that I never look on it like that, that it was a gift, the accumulation of all of the birthdays and Christmas's we had ever missed.

Up until that moment it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It was perfection, all of the beauty I had ever lost or tasted and it was mine. There is no describing it, as you have so often failed to do in the past, and what is the point when you have seen it so often? My Stradivarius.

I could not play it yet, my arm still rigidly bound but the sight of it was enough in those earlier days to keep my mind from the cocaine, from depression. It held in a single object all of my life from Naples and the best parts of the life I had gained in London.

I chose more classes, more studies; Mycroft encouraged my obsession with sensational literature, sending me to the libraries of London, letting me loose on everything our city has to offer. It was as I began interaction with the underbelly of London, that I saw how perfect a match we were. How I could live in any manner I chose and still it was big enough to house my every desire and whim, and yet small enough to be observable. London called out to me in a way no other place had, the boys running in the streets, the theaters, the booksellers each in their own isolated corners and never knowing the bigger picture they presented.

I made my first real choice, the first choice in my entire life if I am being honest. I chose to stay in London.

When I healed I began fighting again, I made connections with men of all walks of life, learning new techniques, new information. Within a year I had created what would be a prelude to my irregulars, boys I paid not in coin but in lessons and tips.

Academically I had made my own connections with those at Saint Bart's in the very lab in which we would meet. I aided with experiments and formulated small ones of my own to create a sort of stinted income on which I might live. My work there was negligible but it earned me a reputation for the unique and the madly brilliant when I worked on my own time. It was this reputation and a situation of utter happenstance that earned me my first case.

The particulars are hardly worth repeating, save they initiated a small chain of events to which I owe the success of my early career. I had thought wonderingly about turning fully to science or turning my eye on being a private detective but the perfection of the situation I found myself was unparalleled. A consulting detective. Word got around as it always does and cases began to appear before me, regular clients in the form of private detectives and police constables doubled my meager earnings.

At this point I was nineteen, a man by any standards, and still living off of the kindness of my brother. Although he never expressed even the slightest desire for me to leave I could see the solitary way in which he was establishing his life, the nights spent alone with his work papers, his closest confidant his pen. I saw the way he was isolating himself from the world and I knew that the tendency lay in me as much as it did him.

I chose not to become the social hermit I found myself drifting towards, I chose to push myself into society. I was thrilled with the possibilities, the fact that if I fell that it would be entirely my own fault. It is an extraordinary thing to choose the smallest aspect of your life when you never had the option before, like learning what freedom is for the first time in the blush of youth.

It took months to find a suite of rooms which appealed to me. There were the simple things, a window from which I could peer onto the street, to be off the ground floor but not so high that I could not jump should the need arise. A cook suitable enough to tempt me into eating when I forgot, and a price I could afford under my own abilities. Then there were the more complicated necessities. I wanted a flat mate, someone who could become my companion, someone I could be a new person around, a person of my own choosing, whoever I ended up being. I wanted to create a home.

When I came to visit Baker Street for the first time and I learned that the owner and caretaker was none other than a woman I almost abandoned the idea on the spot. It was only the perfect set up of the rooms I could see from the street that tempted me into knocking on the door, the way it was out of the way, the way the cobblestones and white building spoke of something safe and homey and indefinable.

I suppose I was expecting one of those abominable characters I had met in dance halls in Italy, the bitterness and the false polite scowl, the makeup worn like war paint as their hungry eyes devoured me. Imagine my surprise when Mrs. Hudson opened the door and looked me over as if I was a stray mutt begging for scraps. She took one look at the decent clothing Mycroft insist I buy and told me that she would not abide by trust fund arrogance and if I expected a slave to go elsewhere. She was the first woman to ever make me laugh.

We shared afternoon tea and she apologized, telling me stories of her last tenant as she set more biscuits on the table. She had a matter of fact way about her that reminded me of the monks, a sharp kind of reality that allowed no room for the image of women I had in my head. We spent almost an hour in each other's company before I ever had a proper tour of the rooms. I told her that day that I would like to move in immediately.


	18. Chapter 18

"I must admit I am tempted to leave my story there."

Watson watched as he raised his hand in a dismissive gesture, long white fingers catching the firelight, but the look in his grey eyes betrayed the seriousness with which he held the information. "But to omit such facts as these when I have already revealed so much seems, petty, like I am putting undo worth on secrets you may have already guessed at." For the first time since the story had begun anew grey eyes focused on him, there was the slightest twist to his lips, like a smile.

"Then again perhaps not."

"Really Holmes!" Watson tried to sound indignant at the feigned insult but he was surprised how easily the laughter filled his own voice. How so little had changed between them in the last few hours when every revelation and second meant so much, how no amount of tragedy could change the way Sherlock Holmes could make him feel.

Holmes was smiling at him, really smiling, that teasing one that made his heart hammer in his chest and now made him wonder if anyone else had ever had the privilege of seeing it. In a deep jealous part of himself he hoped no one else had ever been granted this, that this part of Holmes belonged exclusively to him.

He was staring again as he had been doing so often lately, it had become something of a bad habit. Watching Holmes, examining his every reaction, but now the time of wondering why had passed. He took this break in the story, this silent laughter he could not look away from without busying himself, to put another log on the fire, letting the warm flames lick over his chilled body for a moment too long before returning to his seat and finding that the humor had died from his friends face. That Holmes sat lost in himself once more, his eyes staring somewhere far off, somewhere years into the past in a place Watson did not yet exist.

"Holmes?" A raise of his eyebrows was all he received as he pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders, suddenly cold. "You were older then that when we met. Did you live with others before me?"

"No." The same quark of a smile haunted his lips like a ghost. "You were, and are the only one. I found that finding a person to share my rooms with me would be infinitely more difficult than finding them."

" Mycroft would have been happy to give me the rent and allow me to live alone indefinitely , money was no longer an object for him, his position afforded him his wants and I was his only indulgence. This situation would have been unbearable to me, I already owed him my continued existence. We came to a compromise, he would pay the other half of the rent until such a time that I found the person with which to share them. This arrangement left me feeling like less of an invalid and still gave him some rein of control over my life when our relationship was still so new that he feared that out of pride I would choose the first person available and thus release him from his binds.

Between Mycroft's circle of colleagues and acquaintances and my own from lab and university there was an unending parade of potential borders. Men watching my brothers political rise accosted me in hopes of getting to him, people having difficulty with experiments approached me in the hopes that I could assist them and others came simply for want of a place to stay. Each man I gave an extensive interview, watching as their stories deviated from my own deductions. I read faces as false as my own. I listened to the meek and the confident alike and in each of them I read something that I could not tolerate. Their faults were rarely as bad as my own but I could not fathom living with them, sharing my life with their unworthy minds.

I began to understand why Mycroft lived alone, why he dealt with men during the day and shared his life with no one, his adventures unspoken of, untold. As the months passed and the hopefuls melted away into shadow I forgot my original attempts at an almost normal life. I threw myself into my work, my cases were growing by the month, becoming more interesting, more challenging, my life was forming under my hands in the precise way I wanted. My chemical experiments were consuming me. I had passed on no less than three cases that year that could have been solved if a splotch or stain could have been identified as blood and I knew I was getting close to an answer. I had already refabricated my notes from Italy, it was coming to the point that I was in need of blood more than time. I remember how my left arm was covered in plasters with all the pricks I had taken from it, I imagined that to the unobservant eye the little bandages hid the fading scars from once shattered arm.

And now the two characters meet, the little boy grown and becomes the man you know, a past and a present rectified. Yes, I can see the recognition on your face and the way I was correct, you never thought twice about all of those bandages for such little wounds.

I have come at last to the conclusion of my sordid history. The day my experiments with hemoglobin at last came to fruition. The day that I met you.

I had taken several classes with Stanford in the past, he was never the most brilliant of students, always remaining firmly in middle of the pack but he was dim enough to be amiable to almost anyone he ever met. I never took particular care to hide my peculiarities at this point in time; I can still recall with perfect clarity some of the spectacular faces I inspired in him with my more erroneous outbursts. When he walked in the door that day only moments after I had verified my success with the obvious intent of speaking to me I could not rein in my excitement.

Of course I saw you standing there, thin as a waif and brown as a nut as you would put it later, but I was consumed with my work, with testing my compound one final time. I made as series of observations and deductions about you so quickly in my subconscious that I was not even aware of the steps I was taking, it was as if you had walked in and handed me a synopsis of your recent past and yet I had not let you say a single word.

When again the test worked, when I held in my hands my success and the guarantee that I could be financially independent from Mycroft I saw you for what was truly the first time. Stanford had one of those looks upon his face, as if I had stepped off the edge of the world and I had reemerged with all of the demons of hell on my heels and you stood there next to him and yet a world apart. Where in him I had inspired near horror and bewilderment in you there was unbridled, pure, amusement. You were repressing the laughter shining in your eyes and yet there was something intelligent lingering beneath it, an appreciation of the work I had done, an appreciation of me.

All of my deductive reasoning failed me. All the classes I had taken, the years of studying people and striving to understand them and I had no idea why I wanted you to stay just like that, joy filling your wounded body, with me, forever.

You were the first irrational decision I made in my entire life.

When you said you were looking for rooms I did not want to interrogate you as I did the others, I did not need to know a single thing more. You had a reality and kindness about you that none of the others had had, it was as if they were marching blindly through life as you were just stumbling into it.

I did not want to give you the chance to slip away.

I went to Mycroft that night, as soon as you left me, and told him everything. I always believed that when I found a flat mate my brother would insist on meeting them, to observe for himself how we interacted together, to assure himself in his protective manner that I was not at last giving up on the life I had chosen. I should have known from that moment that something astounding was happening, because he did not insist, he saw something in the way I spoke about you even then.

You must promise to forgive me my little lies I felt so necessary at the beginning. By that point Mrs. Hudson had grown fond of me despite of myself and when I requested that she show us the rooms together as if I had only just visited her for the first time recently she agreed. I did not want you to know the peculiar circumstances under which I was staying in the rooms, no need to make all the wrong questions arise between us. It was her idea to move my few personal things downstairs for the time being and say that the few pieces I had brought with me were part of the suite. She always has enjoyed her little parts in my strange adventures, moving here has ruined me for any other place.

Do you remember that first ride we shared together to Baker Street, our knees knocking together like little boys? The little speech of faults I had prepared for you just to see you laugh, to see the strange reactions you had to my insanity? The way I nearly lost myself into the way I did not have to rein myself in around you.

I cannot remember a day in my life before that in which I laughed so much.

You may not believe it but before that day with Stanford in the lab I had rarely felt the need to explain any of my successes to my peers. Of course I would feel the first thrill of brilliance, the yearning to share, to have an audience. I would be enveloped in the sound of a sonata I had completed, the delicate traces of clues through a tangled and convoluted web, the relations of two chemicals and the resounding implications. And I would get no further than a few words, a sentence or two and their faces would drop and their eyes would look into nothing and I knew it did not matter what I said, that my joy was only my own. Something to be locked away somewhere safe and private because no one else could hope to appreciate it the way I did.

And then you came to me.

You watched me with wide eyes as we wandered these empty rooms and the boxes of your things appeared on the stairs. You listened to my stories and explanations, no matter what the topic you never shied away from it, never coming up with the reaction I would have expected. You have always had the inexplicable ability to ask the perfect question, to wonder about the one thing I would not have considered. You inspired genius in me.

In those first few weeks where you never asked the questions burning on your tongue I reveled in your examination of me. Every moment you evaluated me I was learning to be the man you now know. I was learning how to live with someone who brought out the best in me.

I know that you view those early days with a contempt for your own physical weakness, the way your shattered nerves had you on edge, made you cry out in your sleep, but it meant more to me then you could ever understand. All it took was the touch of my hand on your shoulder and I could draw a smile from you as if for an instant I was something divine. When I learned to link my arm through yours without a word, when I could see you begin to tremble, you looked on me as a friend. Although we never spoke of our pasts, when we were together like that it felt as if it did not matter.

I thought of telling you, when you began to notice those inescapable details. How despite the flood of clients no friends ever called on me. How while the rest of our peers were pairing off at an alarming rate we remained closeted in our rooms with Mrs. Hudson being the only lady I allowed into our lives. Perhaps even the way I could spend hours on the settee in the living room and no shadow of hair would ever mar my cheeks. But by then we had become partners.

You looked at me the way no one ever had, with a respect and wonder I had never dreamed possible in the course of my life. You were singular to me, the one person I had ever known that saw me for what I was instead of the castrati that I had been made. To you I was the detective and the chemist, I was the eccentric genius with mad experiments and somehow none of that was repellent. To you I was the friend with whom you had grand adventures like the storybooks you read. You saw the man you had grown to know, the person I had become.

You had become my only friend. My most intimate companion.

I could not chance destroying that for something as insignificant as my past, no matter how much you wished I would.

That all changed of course.

You could never walk away from an injury, physical or otherwise once you knew of its existence. I had to hide my mutilations from you when you treated my leg and I could see you take on the pain you perceived in me in my actions. I watched as the only true friendship in my life, the most pivotal decision I had ever made, became infected with pity and wondering. I watched you plan your ill conceived plans, I let you conduct your experiments on me and I did not have the heart to derail you.

To be honest, I did not think it would break me so easily. I underestimated the power you have over me which I am powerless to combat.

I did not think that after my life so gentle a touch as yours would be the one to break me."

Throughout the tale Holmes had been as impartial as if it was a story he had once read, a plotline of morbid creation, something factual and unemotional as the weather. The emphasis lay in the right places, the inflection rang true, but it was told with empathy, not personal emotion. As if he could really tell the whole thing and emerge the same man.

But now that it was over his long limbs seemed to fold tighter together, knees held tight against his chest, the blanket falling open and revealing a sliver of porcelain skin, his dark meticulous hair falling into his face haphazardly. As if he was shrinking in on himself, pulling himself in, trying to disappear into his great mind and forgetting that he left the physical world behind. Grey eyes which had always shone with life and brilliance were becoming distant and hazed as a drug coma.

Now that the last strains of the story had finally been told there was nothing left of him, as if the story had pulled its life from him, brutalizing him with every stolen and coerced word.

Watson recognized the look. The way he held himself was something dangerously close to his own heart.

Like trying to explain how it felt to watch bullets destroy youthful flesh in the battlefield, to explain the sensation of molten lead impacting with his body and shattering bone in the safety of the hospital and then trying to pretend as if your very essence had not been exposed and splayed for examination. Like every fiber of your being was pulling in a thousand different directions and you are teetering on the edge of explosion and oblivion and the only way to escape it is to give up utterly.

"Holmes." Grey eyes flicked to him for but a moment and then away again as if they could not bear the sight of him, could not look into eyes now created to be his perfect judge. Watson ignored the dull throb in his leg. The wet material clung to the scar tissue of his thigh, tacky against his skin as he leaned forward, his hand stretching out as if to touch and then retracting. The blanket covering his own shoulders slipped lower, scratching against the ragged edges of white nerveless tissue like a spider web of shattered glass. "What is it that you think will happen now that I know?"

Something, some indefinable dark emotion flickered across his friends face so quickly he almost missed it, a self-deprecating smirk, a pained grimace, profound sadness. Incommunicable pain rearing its head before being swallowed down, hidden away to where his secrets once lingered but now the scar tissue had been ripped afresh and copied into foreign minds.

"You say 'think' as if I have nothing more than a guess." Long fingers danced an erratic pattern, what would be random with any other to him would be a lost sonata or the Morse code of a message only he could understand, lost against the black of his pants and the fickle trick of time. His arms were pulled taught, wiry muscles straining silently as if he held himself together by force, actions normally hidden by long sleeves and layers of clothing captivating the eye. "As if reason and logic do not create the deductions and possible futures coursing through my mind." He took a deep breath, filling his slender chest, his eyes sinking closed as he deflated with the exhalation. His voice became that well known rise and fall of the explanation of a worthy case, the threads of clues coming together to form a final obvious truth.

"I cannot, of course, tell you the imminent future but I can give you a breakdown of what will is most likely to transpire between us. The future that I failed to prevent despite myself." The rhythm of his unheard song changed, the pattern of his fingers slowing, each motion and curve of a knuckle seeming to span entire heartbeats. Moonlight Sonata.

"At first you will act as if nothing has changed and for awhile it will even feel as if this is true, you will look at the future I predict now and you will smile to yourself and think of how melodramatic and pessimistic I was. This period will span days, time I assure you I will not waste. We will have breakfast together every day, we will attend the theater, dinner, perhaps a case will come our way and we will go out together as we have for so many years. Then, one day you will wake, the shock will have worn off and all of the details which once meant nothing will impress themselves upon you.

You will touch my hand and my skin will seem too soft, when I speak you will hear the soft inevitable tinge of youthfulness and height that you had never perceived before you knew to look. You will change the way you are with me. You will not mean to, I would never accuse you of that, never imagine you so cruel. But where you once saw infallibility you will see flaws. You will interpret my actions through the new lens through which you will view me. My word will become less omnipotent, you will question our adventures, imagine reasons for the way I treat clients. You will give reasons for my actions in a way that before where too shrouded in mystery to interpret.

It may take the passage of weeks, months or even years but you will progressively distance yourself from me. Your stories in the Strand will taper off, you will take on more clients as a doctor and more and more often my requests for your company will be, regretfully, denied.

Others will start to remind you of me. The ragged youth on the corner calling out in a sweet high voice the newest headline. The couple holding hands in your office, one hand on a swollen belly and the evidence of the next generation, the things I am incapable of having but still exist for you.

You will find a girl. You will insist it is love, or at the very least that she is a good woman. You will get engaged and all of your spare time will be spent courting her.

You will reassure me that you will visit, that it will be as if nothing has changed at all.

By the time you officially move out of Baker Street you will barely notice my absence.

I will become the friend that you invite to Sunday dinner, the one that lingers after dinner for another drink and a single cigarette without the presence of your wife just to pretend that we still know each other. To pretend that the silences in which we stand do not hold more meaning now than the words we share.

I will be the name brought up on a distant Sunday by your smiling wife as she tells you to invite me to dinner. You will have every intention of doing so, before a patient calls on you. And another. And another. Until the day is gone and I am nothing but a lingering feeling of forgetfulness haunting the back of your mind.

Years will pass. You will read my name in the papers and maybe this night will have faded from your memory entirely. You will remember our days together as fondly as a dream. You will remember us as we are in the stories you captured us in.

We will age, our bodies will deteriorate and those around us will suffer similar fates. Some will die young, some will move away and others will grow up. Perhaps you will be on wife number two when we find our paths come together again.

You will be rushing off on an errand, off your usual path but well within the monotony of your accustomed life when you see me. At first you will not know me, an almost familiar face in the haze of decades. And then you will see me through the years.

You might nod at me and contemplate moving past me but you will condemn the thought a moment later. Your smile when our hands grasp tight will be genuine and fond. You will say how sorry you are that you have to run and you will propose drinks together soon. In that moment you will mean every word.

Alone in the darkness of you room that night, your wife off put by your dour mood, you will hold a note written to me- and you will crumple it and put it in the bin with all of the half written notes inscribed with my name and you will think to yourself that it was silly to imagine that you could go back. Even for a drink. Even for just a stolen moment.

I will understand when I do not hear from you. I will not blame you but neither will I write you.

If we see each other again as we age we will smile, share a word, and disappear."


	19. Chapter 19

A knot had formed in the pit of Watson's stomach, like swallowing ice and stone as he watched Holmes and let his words pour over him without objection; knowing that to Holmes words and promises would mean nothing. His fingers trembled as he released his death hold on the blanket secured around his body, purposefully allowing it to trail down his naked flesh and pool on his abandoned chair as he stood.

Holmes' eyes flashed to his body, lingering on the scar branching to the front of his chest as if committing every line to memory, devouring his own brand of mutilation. The scars which other men purposefully looked away from as if they were something fowl and intimate, the scars Holmes had never had the opportunity to observe in his own need to hide himself.

Watson crossed the space between them in a single stride; sinking to his knees so that they were face to face and the only barrier that lay between them were long legs folded close his chest, still damp with rain. Holmes gaze burned into his shoulder, his expression unchanging, expecting the refusal of the proposed future, the promise of intimate friendship as long as they both lived.

Holmes long white fingers still drummed out their mute tune, silenced only as Watson took the hands he had describe so many times in stories into his own warm embrace, lacing their fingers together as they had in the theater, in the ride home. Making actions speak louder than words at last.

Grey eyes flickered to his face, piercing and brilliant and shattered, waiting for the beginning of the end.

"I won't let that happen." His voice spoke of a lifetime of harsh proclamations, a voice which had made demands of death itself. The hint of a smile began to thread itself across his lips as Holmes stared into his eyes, hanging, however hopelessly, on his every word. "You have ruined me for any other place."

Watson took a slow measured breath, reaching forward as he had imagined doing a thousand times, his fingertips brushing across the strong bones of his cheek, turning reverently so that the back of his knuckles left a trail of fire as they skirted across unfamiliar skin. Soft as he had imagined.

"I did not start all of this just to torture you into trusting me." He leaned closer, whispering the words as if they were his most intimate secret, his chest pressing against Holmes legs, naked flesh rasping against damp cloth, heat passing into one another. Their entangled hands were trapped between them, crushed against Watsons hammering heart, their breaths mingling heady and intoxicating.

"I wanted to help you."

It was the doctor's voice speaking, reassuring and safe, a voice to hear in the darkness of illness, but it was the friend whose blush painted his cheeks a fiery red, the loyal partner whose eyes shone like the treasures of the world where at his fingertips.

"Watson-"

Holmes voice was too low, strangled, his hand clutch tight around Watsons, against the thumping heart pressing against him, conditioning telling him to pull away and the hopeless part of his mind, that silent right hemisphere telling him this is Watson, this is home.

He pushed the back of his hand against Watson's chest even as thick fingers clutched him close, back against muscle, feeling the soft scratch of light brown hair, the steady heartbeat reverberating through his own delicate bones.

It was more skin then he could remember touching, each inch becoming the focal point of his existence, stealing his voice from him. His grey eye flashed with too much stimuli, too much input when all of the data seemed to be wrong. He swallowed thickly and tried again, calmer, his lips set in a line, an actors grace. His voice did not break or faulter.

"I will not let you do this. I will not allow you to sacrifice yourself for me."

"For once I am not sacrificing myself for you." The smile on Watsons lips was calm and shining, his eyes unflinching, willing him to understand, to see into him the way he read into others, to see the truth he felt at the very core of his bones.

"I will not let us be separated by time or fate or even your deductions. Without you I am not alive, you can see that in our separate futures as well as I can. You have ruined me for monotony." Watsons fingers stopped their maddening mindless pattern across his cheek, slowing to hold his face, only his thumb left brushing across smooth skin.

"I am being perfectly selfish."

A flash of that perfect roguish smile which wooed women in three continents and made all the years added by war and illness disappear from his face, the one that made Holmes think of all the times they crouched together in the darkness, the one that made it seem as if the world was theirs for the taking.

And then it was gone.

His voice lowered. His heart pounding against his ribcage, against their joined hands. So incredibly real.

Holmes could not look away from his lips, hoping for a smile, hearing damnation, a false hope he could not afford to posses.

"I want to help you accept another's touch, I want you to know that to me you will never be anything less then you are. Never a monster, never mutilated." A breath shaky and twirling around them, a smile, something sincere and private and real.

"Nothing but Holmes."

Watsons maddening hand skirted back into messy black hair, fingers tangling in soft locks and gripping as he bent forward, crushing their bodies together, a tangle of arms and legs and chests. His blue eyes dropped for the first time to thin red lips as their breathes mingled from a scant inch apart, their foreheads touching, noses pressing against one another, an intimate brush of flesh.

"I want to be the one who touches you."

"You have failed to process what I have told you." Holmes shut his eyes against the sight, shut out the feeling of Watson against him, the warmth of his flesh, becoming the actor, hardening himself against the world, against the trail of Watsons breath across his skin.

"You cannot grasp what it means, what I am-" His words were strong, confident, void of emotion save for the tinge of unsilenced desperation.

Until the words were stolen from him, until they died on Watsons lips.

Logically it was nothing but the presses of two mouths, the mechanical action of bringing two pairs of lips together, no more dramatic than brush of fingers.

But irrationally,

Emotionally,

It was as if time itself had stopped, like crime had ceased to exist, like the entirety of his being was captured and held in wet heat of Watsons kiss and the world had been rendered meaningless.

Another choice decided for him, another future torn from him in the span of a heartbeat.

As Watson pulled his lips away remaining so close that their eyelashes brushed, that the heat of his breath saturated the air and his own gasped name was pressed to the side of his mouth like a caress, the entire course of their future changed, disappearing in a burst of smoke, and curling into oblivion.

The choice which would validate every torment of his life, because it had brought him here.

"You are wrong." Watson whispered against his skin, his fingers tangling and sliding through his hair, musing black strands and letting them fall loose, electric with his touch. "I took in every word." Another kiss teasing the side of his mouth, stealing the logical part of his mind, training every fiber of his being on the way he felt, the way his lips lingered just a moment too long. "While you spoke I learned to hate people for hurting you and love others for what they did for you." The hand holding his held him tight and then released its grip, leaving it resting on Watsons bare chest, feeling alone the heady pump of his heart. Two gentle hands held his face, fingers tracing the pattern of his bones as if he were something precious and rare. "I have reconciled the little boy in your story and the man I have grown to know."

Holmes put his free hand over Watsons, he could feel the digits move as they traced over his own face. He could not help the slow exhalation as his fingers wrapped around the man's wrists, tugging gently to free himself, a cold feeling slipping over his heart as he moved. Watson knew his intentions immediately; his expressive face betraying all the pain he felt in the motion, Holmes felt cowardice flood him as he closed his eyes against the sight.

"Even if I am wrong about our future you still have not felt the full impact of what I have told you. You are-" Watson resisted his grasp, refusing to let go, sinking his hands back into black hair and gently pulling grey eyes back to his.

"Too calm?" Watson interrupted, his question hanging between them like a cloud of bitter poison, his eyes suddenly burning and wet. "I am trying to be calm because there is nothing I can do. Do you know how it feels to sit and listen to you talk about them hurting you and know that I was not there to protect you? For me it is as if they are hurting you for the first time. I would give anything to reach into your past and kill every one of them like the beasts they are but I am helpless. I have killed better men for less and these bastards run free. " A shaky breath tore through his form, the heart against Holmes hands sounding like a war drum, the skin flushed and hot beneath his palm.

"You have always underestimated what you are to me. You imagined I could ever bare to leave you?" Watson shook his head desperately as if to dispel the idea, eyes coming back to his, imploring him to understand. "I watch you throw yourself into danger as if you were worthless, and it is as if a piece of me dies every time. Do not imagine that a single injury befalls you that I do not feel? So do not for a second believe that I could possibly hear you recount your life and emerge intact, let alone be able to force it from my mind."

Watson was shaking, his fingers trembling, previously unknown expanses of skin glistening as muscles tensed beneath the surface. Blue eyes looked up at him with pure unadulterated adoration, a field of innocents in a mind filled with the refuse of the cruelty of man.

His closest friend in agony and held at arms length.

Watson was strong; he was a doctor, a veteran of war, the partner with an iron countenance and a steady hand. It was never suppose to be like this. Watson was never supposed to be so affected because of him, for him.

He had never wanted to see Watson shake like that again. Like waking up screaming in the night. Like phantom pains from a bullet long ago extracted.

He had been a fool. He let emotion cloud his judgment like nothing but a common mind, an idiot heart. He had kept his own confidence for years, guarding it jealously as if his very existence depended on it and he let a few touches break down his walls, let an embrace shatter his steel resolve.

He had failed and it was Watson paying the price.

The newest victim of his life, the newest scar tissue.

With a conscious effort he let the turgid muscles of his arms relax from their self embrace, he felt the blanket fall from his shoulders but it was inconsequential. Long legs unfolded and fell gracefully to the floor, in their absence he could feel the night air against his bare chest, felt naked and exposed. But Watson was falling into his arms, his chest, his heart pressing against him, warm strong arms surrounding him, holding him.

As if he still had a home here.

A/N: One chapter to go. (One very long and absolutly my favorite, chapter) So while I still have the chance... THANK YOU! For everyone who read this, to everyone who commented and told me what you thought. Thank you, thank you, thank you.  
I hope you enjoy. Enjoyed. Will enjoy.  
See you, one last time, in chapter 20.


	20. Chapter 20

"I am, sorry, Watson." The words left his lips slow and heavy and fell into his friend's ear in an exhalation of breath. "You inspire genius in me in regard to our cases and the most blinding of emotions in personal matters and you seem to suffer the worst from it all." His breath caught and hitched as Watsons adept fingers lingered on the small of his back, pulling him forward so that their bodies where flush with not an inch of space between them from stomach to shoulder, hearts pounding into each other's chests. Nowhere left to hide.

Hands spread possessively across his back, fingers burning across naked skin, counting the ripple of his bones. He wanted to speak again but he had no words left, there was only the rush of blood in his ears, the sound of their breaths echoing against one another.

The press of lips against his.

"I am not sorry. Not for any of it." He was being crushed, the lines of their bodies melding until it no longer mattered where one began and the other ended. Lips crushed against his again and this time he was ready.

He would not squander this opportunity, not hurt Watson again only to deny himself simply on the basis that it would not happen again. Nothing last forever, everything in life is fleeting and precarious. When Watson realized the full extent of his misguided desire he would leave, and with him he would take the life they had created. But in his wake would not be the bitterness of misguided rejection but the resonance of this single memory resplendent in its glistening light, the accumulation of years building to a final fatal pinnacle.

Like having a single night on the stage, loved by all the world, and then disappearing into shadow and obscurity.

A single memory to call upon when he had nothing left.

This time his own hand crept to the back of his friends neck, holding him gently in place as their mouths joined, as lips caressed and held and eyes slipped closed in surrender.

Their hearts pounding together.

They gasped against each other as they separated, each sucking lungful of air sweeter with deprivation, sweeter because their chests heaved against one another hotter than the dying fire.

"I will never be sorry for a single moment I spend with you." Watson's voice promised in ironic counterpoint to his own bitter thoughts, making him smile brokenly into their abandoned kiss. Hands slipped across his body, caressing skin that is too soft, too pale and adolescent, and muscles too underdeveloped. His own hands trailed boldly over his partner's body, memorizing every inch before it could be taken away. Tracing over flat stomach, the stark contrast of muscled flesh and furred skin to his own undeveloped nothingness. Touching and mapping the ridged smooth scar tissue like an explosion of a spider web cast across his partner's skin, the wounds that tortured him in the night, the flesh that ached in the damp London weather his to touch and molest. Muscles that lifted a gun, a cane, a blade in his defense, skin once covered by layers of socially proper cloth unveiled for these fleeting minutes. Hips pressed between thighs, spread open and pinned in place by Watson's body, by warm hard flesh.

Desperate sucking kisses burned the skin of his jaw, his neck, the hollow of his clavicle as Watson sought to obliterate his mind. Bristled skin scratched against him, a soft mustache lighting every nerve in his skin until lips returned to his. Swollen and red and wet.

A kiss that betrayed the desperation of two people knowing that they could never again return to this moment.

Watson devoured him, the kiss changed, lips and teeth and tongue working together to invade him. Unhindered taste was added to the attic of his mind, locked away to later haunt him in the darkness of the lonely night where he could disappear into the memory of Watson. He locked into memory the ghost of him, a pale echo to suckle flesh and invade wet heat.

He opened himself to Watson, let himself be invaded, plundered, tasted, a foreign tongue pressing into him, inviting, hands clutched feverishly at his skin, hands pressing fingertips into his hips hard enough to bruise, short nails drawing blood.

This time when they gasped for air his lips were wet with the lingering taste of him, as swollen as Watsons, as wanton and foolish. The wet sound of their lips parting was enough to send warmth to the pit of his stomach, driving out all lingering thought of self preservation.

He wanted more, another kiss to memorize, to feel love. A fleeting moment, and then, nothing.

He bent forward, his lips ghosting over Watsons before hands caught his face, holding him sill until blue eyes bore into him once more, familiar blue all but swallowed with black.

He could taste him on his breath. The beat of his heart was pulled away from his own, leaving him cold but for the pulse in wrists pressed to his face, proof that he was not yet alone.

Watsons voice broke between them, heavy, raspy and low with desire, with raw unbridled emotion, demanding to be heard, demanding understanding. Eyes pinning him place, leaving him more naked then the press of his body, than the revelation of all of his exposed deformities.

"I love you."

A chaste kiss pressed to his nose, to both cheeks just below his eyes, hands still holding him in place so that every expression could be dissected and interpreted, to make sure that the words held the right understanding, the proper weight. Like forever in a moment, a lifetime come to its final pinnacle.

He did not move, did not let his face change or drop or twist, to betray not a glimmer of emotion. To be the perfect actor, all of those years put to use. The final great performance he had never had.

He would pretend he was under the bright unforgiving stage light at last.

Easy to smile when your heart is shattering. Easy to lie.

Commit the words selfishly to memory, their resonance, their truth. The way they were said as if they could never be said to another. Only for him, the glint in blue-black eyes, the familiar lines of his friends face twisted into agonizing emotion, into misguided love. Bright as a flash in the fleeting black night.

Easy to love the idea of him, the mask, the face, the surface. Easy to love when the scars still lay beneath the surface and the mutilations are yet to be truly discovered, to commit yourself to half life by binding yourself to a half person. A mind without a soul, a brain without a body to match.

In months maybe Watson could forget the words, he could forget the inflection of his voice, never know how he looked in this moment.

But it would haunt Holmes for the rest of his life, words that mean more than the press of a stolen kiss.

Words never to be said again, to be taken back in horrified silences, in the moments of the future which lay before them in the professions of love for another. The knowledge and understanding of knowing if those words were uttered again in a day, in a month, they would never hold the same resonance, romantic love and endless promise lost to the casual love of a beloved friend.

Never like this again. Never so much like true life.

"I was walking through life half dead until I met you. You brought me to life."

Watson went to kiss his cheek, his chin, butterflying kisses across his skin, as if memorizing the sharp lines of his face with his lips. Holmes waited until lips descended on his skin and turned his head, stealing another kiss, pulling him down, holding them together, daring to taste, to invade, to make Watson whimper against his mouth. Sounds filed into the attic of his mind, drawers and rooms filled with only him.

Watson never closed his eyes, blue boring into grey, two eyes blurring into a wall of unfathomable blue.

In the morning Watson could take back his words as a fool's, as a dream and hope and illusions shattered in the harsh day light.

Holmes bit at Watson's lips, needing to hear that sound again, to feel arms hold him closer, to close around him as if they would never let go, hands possessive on his skin.

"And you, my dearest Watson-" A breath, a life, the beginning of the end and a confession "-are my life."

Words that Holmes would never take back.

His smile was like watching the sun rise and erase the shades of grey from London, like all the doubts and inevitabilities of tomorrow could melt under his brilliance until there was nothing but now. Until the press of flesh was almost enough to erase the guilt.

It was a new type of kiss, lips stretched into a blinding smile, teeth threatening to clash against soft flesh and opposing teeth. Hands grew bolder, trailing down his chest and brushing over nipples, pink turned rosy with the flush of blood, sensitive enough to make him gasp and writhe under his practiced hands. Fingers daring to touch new skin, to linger on his lower back, fingers dipping beneath the cloth, the slide of slick flesh instead of coarse wet fabric enough to make him arch into waiting heat before his mind could tell him to stop.

A shiver of panic saturating his spine, stilling his hips even as warm hands blazed a trail of fire across untouched flesh, fingers lingering dark places.

To lay naked before caring, dissecting, eyes. To be at last uncovered.

To see all of the scars and mutilations reflected in eyes more beloved than his own, to see the personal horror of a failed lifetime shared, flayed and cast into the sun. To see love cringe and shrink away.

To see love die in the echoes of horror and forgotten screams.

Dawning horror.

Love over before it began, not even a moment to last forever in perfect crystallized memory, untouchable.

Too broken and soiled to be loved even for a single deluded night.

"Sherlock."

Lips against his, begging for entrance, granted and devouring; warm arms wrapping around him, engulfing him, washing away the world and the last traces of logical thought form his mind. Vague indefinable terror lingering just outside of his embrace, outside of this shared comfort.

"Stay with me."

Warm and hot at once, whispered against his ear, a delicate lobe stolen between warm lips, bitten, a shiver of another kind wracking his body, pushing his arms around Watson, holding on as if by force he could keep this moment, this perfection. To hold them in rapture.

A groan and a whimper pressed into his neck, the sounds somewhere between mindless abandoned bliss and anguish. "I won't let you go." A subconscious promise dark and beautiful whispered into the hollow of his throat, teeth dragging sensuously across his skin, lips sucking blood to the surface as if trying to taste his very essence, red and purple blood pooling just beneath the skin, marked, loved, causing his heart to pound wildly in his chest. False words and pretty lies driving him closer to the edge of oblivion.

Every inch of marked skin ached the moment his lips left it, wet and bruised and abandoned to the air, the ghost of feeling haunting him, ruining him. Desire aching, spreading across his body and pooling heavy between his legs like liquid fire, twisting his limbs.

Lips returned to his, tongues pressing, kissing so deeply that he could taste the tang of sweat soaked skin in his mouth. Hands spread across his chest possessively, fingers fanning out over his heart, their kiss pressing him back into the chair. Not for a moment was he released, Watsons body pushing on top of his, hips pressed flush, chests rubbing and pressing sensuously against one another, the unique friction of skin on skin.

Watson's blunt nails scrapped across his chest, dragging across nipples, making him arch and gasp as the sensation from two pinpoints spread into every corner of his body, nerves of an untouched body set finally alight. Masculine hands drifted lower, thumbs dipping into the waist of his trousers, sliding beneath layers of cloth and delving into the hollow of his hips, fingers curving around him, holding him in place as sensation wracked his body.

Pinned like a butterfly.

Words mumbled into his lips, a wordless rasp of lips and tongue against him, indecipherable as his mind flooded. He tried to kiss him back, to taste and catalog and render him speechless, to stop the flood of words before they could destroy him further. Before Watson could pull him into foolish hope and surrender the last of his crumbling walls, to make him dream for a moment of forever when a night was already too much to ask.

A soft wet sound as Watson pulled away, their lips parted, a brilliant smile pressed to his skin, unbridled joy, glistening eyes looking on him as if he were still real.

"My beautiful love." Watsons fallible human heart pumping against him, their bodies slick, pale flesh pressed together, belly to belly, scars pressing against scars, puzzle pieces fitting together, clues sliding into place. Fingers dipping lower, pushing down cloth, delving to where thigh met groin, soft untouched skin, the pad of a thumb stroking hallowed flesh.

"Do you know that to me-" A half an inch closer to the scars, the pooling of blood and heat in the pit of his stomach, a strange stirring he could not control, basic human instinct taking control of his limbs, pressing him closer. A lost strangled cry in the back of his throat, muffled against Watsons skin in a moment of mindless need, the tang of skin in his mouth as his teeth closed over the throbbing pulse in his neck, marking him. Bite marks in white flesh, so when the morning came he would know it had not been a lie. Sweat and musk on his tongue, the intimate pulse of his heart beating for him.

"-you are perfect." Hands engulfed in wet cloth, holding him, stroking almost innocent skin, as his trousers dipped dangerously low on his hips, protruding bones naked in the firelight.

Perfect.

Not mutilated.

Not broken.

More than the machine mind without a heart.

Large warm hands plundering soft skin never meant to be touched and held him close, meaningless words whispered in his ear, a warmth, a smell, a touch, that means Watson. Means home.

For a brilliant instant none of it mattered. Not the boy in the forest or the chemist with his blood. Just the hands, the heat, the rush of a heart in his ears. Safe in his arms. To feel. To be loved. He arced into warm hands, pressing into a hard welcoming body.

Mutilated scars pressing into whole flesh. Sensation ripping through him, sweet unparalleled friction making him cry out like a whore and a wanton as something hard pressed innocently, accidentally, into his leg.

A hardness straining against its confines, pressing into scars, masculinity pressing into nothingness.

Proof of mutilation in lack of flesh.

Castrati.

Eunuch.

Monster.

Thick warm hands released him, letting his hips fall untouched to the seat of the chair. Holmes closed his eyes against it, against him, closed his betraying mouth and shut himself off from the world. He closed his hands over his face and he could see them, the cherub boys of Italy playing together in the abandoned rooms of the school, finding pleasure in each other's embrace, safe with their own ilk, malformed organs hanging like a child's between their legs.

Watson pulled away completely, the beat of his heart stolen from him, the press of his organ carefully removed, lips left cold and desolate.

The parties after the shows where the boys would laugh in their chiming voices, sweet with youth, trying to catch the eyes of the rich and powerful. The private rooms they were led believing they had found their way to the top, the cruel deep voices of laughing men tingeing the music of the night, a dissonance in the air. Deep booming laughter as friends joined the rooms where cherubs stood naked, greasy handed men with thin lipped wives and heavy purses.

The slap of a hand on flesh, the sound of clothing rippling as it fell to the ground and mocking voices decreed childish organs useless. Aborted screams turning into subdued sobbing as old hands touched young flesh and masculine organs plowed into unsuitable bodies. The sound of familiar voices, his background, his choir of angels pretending in a poor façade of acting that they enjoyed the brutish pain, the sound of self delusion as they tried to make themselves believe they had still found their secure future.

"Holmes." The calm warm hands of a doctor took his hands from his face, holding his fingers, thumbs dragging over his knuckles as he was pulled to sit up. He did not open his eyes until the last traces of the boys disappeared from his mind, their voices fading into memory as he thrust himself back into the familiar rooms of Baker Street.

Watson was still on his knees before him, chest flushed and heaving, gleaming in the firelight, irises blown black surrounded by a ring of dark blue, his lips were still kiss swollen and wet and red and he was holding his hands as chastely as a brother. He watched as his own hands were raised to Watson's lips and two gentle kisses were pressed to his knuckles.

"I know what I have put you through this last week, the magnitude of what you have told me tonight and what it has taken from you." When Holmes looked he realized that Watsons knees were bent uncomfortably, hiding his arousal from sight.

He almost could have smiled. Watson had not stopped out of his own distaste or even disgust, his body still obviously flushed with desire. He had known the very instant his own mind had wandered to dark places. He was hiding his intact shameless body, he was protecting him.

"I do not want to rip any more secrets from you but I need to know if you have had lovers." Unflinching, unrelenting, the army surgeon with the gun and nerves of steel, gentle enough to remove a heart. "If you know how two men may lay together."

"No." Holmes found himself twining their fingers together, feeling for the change in Watsons pulse, the flutter that meant his touch made his partners heart skip a beat. "I have never let anyone touch me, but I know how the deed is done."

He could almost grasp his own clinical detachment, that aloof place his mind could reside in even as he sat bare chested with his companion between his legs, their fingers lacing, unlacing, tapping the beat of a song into his palm, the strains of a sonata in the back of his mind playing in sweet company to Watsons voice.

"Not a deed. Not between us." Watson's fingers tangled of their own will, changing the song on his skin, changing the music in his mind, a duet instead of a lonely sonata. "A declaration, an act of love-"

This time he did smile, bittersweet. Easy to detach when others are deluding themselves with falsehoods and blatant lies, innocent as children in a cruel world. Easy to fall into old patterns. "Says the romantic writer."

"Says the man in love with you." Watson corrected. Both of them were staring at their joined hands, watching the innocent play of flesh tangle and wind, music like Handle, like Mozart, thoughts turned to sound. "I will not hurt you, you know." A simple offering, words fishing for the reason for his momentary panic, trying to soothe fears without knowing what they might be.

A bitter taste rose in his mouth as the sound of Watson in his mind began to change, tentative and careful in a way he never was with the infallible detective. The mask of false calm he used to sooth injured children and weak minded women. The sound of the end, as inevitable as the dawn.

"With women in three continents to vouch for you how could I fear?" He wanted the words to come out like a prelude to a laugh but dark strains of bitter poison infiltrated the sound. Fingers clenched tight around his, stopping the music in his mind as it built to its gruesome climax, stopping the way a heart stops.

Piercing grey eyes flickered and caught on blue.

"My days of promiscuity ended when I fell in love with you."

A sadness infected Watsons features, a depth of emotion that seemed to dull the skin and eyes, a sorrow that added years to an already troubled face. Like all the years of happiness that lay between them had been a façade, a mask more perfect than his own. It is not possible for a soul to know such anguish and smile as Watson once smiled, to laugh as he laughed, as if it would be the greatest thing he ever did.

It is not to say that he cried. This pain was too old for that, it went beyond the physical, although an ache seemed to radiate off of him, debilitating as his old wounds, radiating from his troubled and ill heart, crashing through Holmes in their strangled touch.

"I know that you do not believe me. That you will give yourself to me tonight believing that I will leave you. That you will let me bury myself within you and you will believe I do not love you." Watson pulled his hands free as if the touch was too much of a lie for him to sustain, but once his fingers were free they fell back to pale skin, catching pallid wrists in his grasp. Like the regret of a death bed, final acts being all that was left in life.

"I would ask you to trust me but I will not force you to lie to me. I could not bear that." A bristled kiss was pressed to each wrist, bottomless blue eyes closing as if memorizing the feel of him, a sentiment that stole the moisture from his mouth and pricked at the back of his own eyes.

If he lied to himself, like cherub boys broken by men in hateful self delusion, if he let himself believe, he could almost see unfathomable love. The promise of forever, superimposed over the reality, dreams lingering in beloved eyes and endless sorrow.

Lies he wished he could believe.

"But I will spend every day of the rest of our lives convincing you."

Hands dropped his wrists and arms wrapped around his lithe chest, pulling him closer even as Watson pressed into him, hard flesh resting between his thighs. Groins meeting and rubbing together, the unforgiving slide of hardened flesh against scars, layers of damp cloth a fleeting barrier between them, stealing his breath as if they had never stopped. Making him pant into Watsons flesh, not given a moment to regret, a moment to dissect or think. Their hearts pounding against each other, pumping so hard and fast that they might try to burst from their chests, to break through flesh to beat together.

Watson was on top of him, pushing him down into the chair so his shoulders pressed into the back, his hands slipping to his waist, pulling his hips off the chair, breathing him in. Thumbs slipped mercilessly into his trousers, tracing maddening circles on the juncture of his thighs as the cloth slipped lower, the warm leather of the seat sticking to exposed flesh.

"Holmes" A sound he had never heard before, a dark melodic resonance that set his teeth on edge, that made his blood boil in his veins. Gone was the sorrowful doctor, the man mourning a love that would never be. A slow purposeful thrust into the curve where leg meets groin, still tingling with the memory of wandering hands, hardness pressing into him, heat burning through cloth. "God." A gasp as if the sensation was too much, the sharp smell of blood as he bit his lip, blackened eyes staring into him without compunction, blatant need. Truth. "I want you."

Lips trailing down his chest, encircling his nipple and giving a teasing bite as they trailed lower, kissing a trail of fire down his stomach until Watson kneeled between his knees, waiting until Holmes looked at him, until the tension had built around them so thick they could scarcely breath.

Cloth peeled away from white skin, dark and heavy, dragging as it released him, lips kissing each new inch of skin, lavishing affection, hungry for more.

Holmes watched as his trousers were pulled free, as he lay naked at last, scars spread out, mutilations revealed between wanton legs. Watson pulled the damp cloth from white thighs, ignoring lands of disfigurement spread before him until every scrap of clothing lay in a crumpled heap at his side.

His hands splayed over white thighs, nails digging into flesh creating crescent moons of red, he took a deep shuttering breath as he mercilessly spread his legs apart, head dipping to examine more closely the white pink scars, fingers making wide sweeps of flesh, coming closer each time to the mound of flesh aching for his touch, hard and engorged with blood.

Blue eyes seared up at him from between his legs, waiting for the moment their eyes locked to press his tongue into the scared flesh of his decimated organ. Watson only waited for the first cry to be ripped forcefully from Holmes' throat, elegant white hands tangling helplessly in his hair, to take him into his mouth. An inch of engorged flesh fitting perfectly into the wet, tight, cavern of his mouth, as if they were made for this. His entirety engulfed between beloved lips as a tongue laved against the scar tissue sensitized by decades of deprivation. Fingers ran the long line beneath where another mans haired testicles would lay, the skin perfectly smooth save for a single ridged canyon on which his fingers played, coaxing sensation, willing hips to push desperately against him, to draw his lips up and down around his flesh, for a voice to cry out in strangled pleasure.

Watson withdrew his mouth with a wet obscene pop, applying his lips to unblemished thighs, biting and nipping, marking them as his own. Before Holmes could pull him back in desperation he put the palm of his hand flat against the stump, pushing and rubbing the wet flesh in time with the desperate circling of his hips, touching parts of him that he could never dream of touching on another man, sexual organs flayed open for him to touch and caress.

Watson bit hard, a purple bruise already forming as he pulled away. Holmes cried out in distress as unfelt sensations threatened to overwhelm him, hands pulled desperately as his pleasure built to unendurable levels, something strange and dry pooling in his stomach.

"Watson!" He swallowed back the building panic as the feeling built without a foreseeable end. Watson marking his skin, marks that would last longer then their fleeting embrace, than the memory of his wet mouth.

Watson let his fingers play across the sensitive skin, across undamaged nerve endings, pushing into intact flesh, manipulating the great detective with his hands, stealing his control. There was panic in his face, in the quick desperate pant of his breath, the unending motion of his hips. Divine torture.

Another gasped breath, a sobbed admission. "I can't-"

Pleasure without fulfillment or release, building eternally, unbearably, his mind holding him back beneath the precipice as grey eyes focused wildly, pleadingly, on him.

Watson spread his fingers out, sliding his hand over his groin, fingers rippling past the flat stomach and heaving chest to at last run up his throat and catch his chin, to focus that great frantic mind on only him.

A kiss to the stump of engorged flesh, a smile pressed into the scars as eyes that sent shivers down the spines of the most hardened criminals dissected him. The great mind needed more than simple touch, more than physical sensation.

"You are beautiful."

He heard him cry out, his voice high and ringing as he hollowed his own cheeks around his friends flesh. The legs around his head trembled, the body beneath his hands straining, all the muscles contracting and then released. His long hard body melting into the chair.

With another breath, like rapture on the tip of your tongue, Watson pushed himself closer, stopping only when his hips pressed into the dark leather of the chair, crawling into the place Holmes walls once existed, pulling him close, their bodies flush as the aftershocks and lingering sensation reverberated through his limbs.

This time when his own clothed arousal pressed into the naked groin of his friend Holmes did not freeze in his arms, did not turn in on himself, lost in a haze of memories. This time grey eyes watched him as if every moment could be made to last an eternity, his body warm and supple and pressing against him even now.

He allowed lips to press to his temple, still and docile as Watson breathed in the scent of him, like dark wild alleys and brilliant light infused in flesh. Like holding lightening in your arms.

"Watson" That heavy sleepy voice flooded his dark reverie as slender arms slipped around his shoulders, one delicate hand trailing up the sensitive skin of his neck to bury itself deep within his auburn hair and bring him down for a kiss. The sweet brushing of lips becoming deeper and less innocent, seconds of wordless affection turning wet and burning and hungry until it engulfed their minds, became the center of their world in taste and sound and touch. A kiss to make Watsons heart pound and break. "That is not all men do." Long legs wrapped around him, thighs encasing his hips, muscles pulling him closer, pressing his painful arousal into welcoming flesh. A whisper dark and wet against his ear that made his loins twitch in their entrapments as the smallest corner of his mind rebelled. "Take me."

It was an act, a face meant to ensnare, a voice to entrap him in lust, a body posing as wanton to seduce but his kiss still tasted like the bitter copper of blood, his body trembled so slightly a lesser man might have missed it, a man less adept at the eccentric ways of Sherlock Holmes.

Beneath the seduction and basic need of the human body, beneath the façade of love, doubt lingered. A nameless fear in a mind that refused to acknowledge such weak emotions, fear in the fearless.

Holmes wanted this part of him before he was left alone. A night of rapture before a lifetime of solitary dreaming and cold recollection. He was collecting data, heartless and analytically trying to define the feeling of love, trying to break a touch down to its basic parts, a kiss into the chemicals released into the mind. He was pretending to believe in forever while preparing for a lifetime spent alone.

Holmes was handing him his body, his guarded emotions and secreted soul, his virginity in return for a single night of memories without the hope of more. To give himself up after a lifetime of isolation and hiding without ever believing in love.

"No." Watson broke their kiss off but the bitter taste lingered in his mouth, he buried his eyes in Sherlocks warm neck, breathing into the hollow of his throat, letting the honest heartbeat lull him from his own heartbreak. To block out the way the hands tracing the contours of his body were set in a specific pattern, memorizing the landscape of his body, a mental map of wounded tissue and anatomical features. "Not like this."

"But-" It was the first real word to emerge from his friends mouth in long minutes spent in each other's arms, somewhat lost, an edge of panic, the hint of betrayal infused in a single syllable. It reminded him of the first time he had been wounded in Holmes company, how fear and indignation seemed to run hand in hand as if he should have been able to control the entire universe.

"You said…" The control was perfect as if he had never faltered but even with his voice back in his command he could not seem to speak the words that Watson plied him with, even now unable to fuse his little act with words that might hold meaning and truth.

Love.

Desire.

"Stop." Watson stole a kiss even as he begged and commanded, pulling a lip into his mouth and releasing it, pulling back before Holmes could respond, before his touch could lie. "I will do as I have promised. I will break my heart for you and spend every day of the rest of my life in repentance for taking your body before your heart." He looked unflinchingly into his face, watching the pain flicker behind his eyes, feeling his heart pound painfully in his chest.

He would not live in the lie Holmes created for him. He would not pretend their first time together was made of joy and love; he would take the dark reality of fear over the fairytale ending Holmes would have him believe.

A reality they could share.

Holmes said nothing but the press of his body changed, less provocative, less falsified, grey eyes fastened on him, half make believe and half frightened. Watson felt his heart break all over again. Until it felt as if there was nothing left of him to break.

Holmes had been right about one point in his predicted future.

Before tonight Watson had never believed the man who leaped into danger and blood and the most sallow holes in London could ever feel fear. That mindless flood of panic, that base human reaction.

Now he knew better, knew the way it haunted his eyes, knew the type of fear to look for, that it was not blood he feared but heart.

Watson closed his eyes and imagined for an instant how it would feel to believe as Holmes does, that they would never see each other again. A flash of brilliance in the night and then only darkness.

That he would never again wake to see Holmes still awake after a long night of contemplation, his long body strewn over the settee, his eyes flashing to him with childlike mirth the moment he walked in the door as if hours had spent in the hopes that he would do just that. To have heard his last private violin concert, the music of thought turned to sound with only him to listen. How it would feel to kiss those lips and hold his body close as if he were his own and then never again set eyes on him.

Such a feeling of sadness filled him that he could scarcely breathe when he opened his eyes to find Holmes still in his arms, still looking at him with his mix of concealed heartbreak and need.

"Not here, not like this is meaningless." Watson gathered long limbs close, his hands sliding along bare flank, holding white flesh pressed to his hips as he stood. The arms around his neck clutched closer, the long winding legs around his waist holding tight. He stood with Holmes captured in his arms like a debauched bride, watching a bright flush paint the white laid out before him.

Each step drove his arousal into the coarse material of his own pants, into the teasing of Holmes' warmth, driving him mad. Every step, every grind, hating his body for its eagerness to commit such an atrocity against his own heart. Watson dug his teeth into his lip, focusing on the sharp sensation, the tang of blood as he pulled Holmes closer to his chest in a futile attempt to reconnect to the world, like child finding safety in a doll crushed over its heart.

He finally held the untouchable in his arms, the accumulation of all of the desperate wanderings of his mind, the man he had watched from his shadow for years, the person who had coaxed him with a harsh laugh and gentled hand back to life when he thought only of death, the man who he would die for…

And it felt like betrayal.

They were not the two partners forgoing a conversation with the look of an eye, the gesture of a hand, not two people who trusted each other with their lives, who cared more for each other than themselves. Not the duo traveling the pages of fantastical mysteries.

They were strangers fumbling together in the dark.

The door closed behind them with a finalistic thud, the clink of the metal lock shutting the door on the outside world. The point of no return. He could not look as he set Holmes down on the covered bed, his long white body gleaming in the near darkness. He saw in his peripheral vision the way he pulled himself completely onto the bed, the way he watched as Watson bent and slowly unlaced his own shoes, delaying the inevitable, giving time a moment to right itself, trying to rein in the bile rising in his throat and the desire raging his gut.

His socks were next to join his meticulous pile, sitting on the floor now, unwilling to sit on the bed in so casual a manner. His hands drifted over the laces of his trousers but he found himself unable to go further. It seemed so clinical, so antiseptic, like a secretary might wait outside the door with a sour face and ink stained hands, a doctor with the glazed look of the untried would walk in at any moment and examine old scars without a hint of empathy or humanity.

He tore his hands away from the ties and stood, thrusting the fancy into the back of his mind with the rest of his writer's wanderings. He did not deserve respite, not now. His hands shook as they opened Holmes' bedside drawer where he knew an untouched jar of cream lay, another crush of guilt rushed over him. Cream that should have been applied to healing wounds, that he should have applied to Holmes himself rather than trusting he would do it. Neglect.

The jar was cold in his hands, he twisted the top violently, applying too much pressure. The creak of a bed told him that the other occupant of the room was moving but he was still shocked when a hand entered his vision, a hand closing over his with the reassurance and confidence of the man he had met all those years ago who held the world at his fingertips.

"Watson."

Even naked and exposed he was not diminished as another might have been. He stood tall and proud, the lines of his body softened in the intimacy of his small bedroom. Like one of Botticelli's angels come to life reaching out of painted gardens and perfection for him.

He no longer clutched to the artifice of forced passion although something akin to it burned with heavy reality in his gaze. When his hand, too soft to belong to a man, glanced across his cheek all of the pain that formed between in the past days, hours, or maybe even the years before seemed to disappear as if they never existed.

"It does not matter what I believe will happen." There was a moment of indecision, and a deep final breath as the last of the great detectives walls were cast off, abandoned at their feet, the refuse of war, the bandages of a caustic life. For him.

"I love you."

When they kissed it was heartbreak and bitter resolve, it was sweet and burning passion. It tasted like a victory and a surrender.

Watson pushed them onto the bed, letting his heavy body pin the detective in place as if he might fly away, surrounding him until he was the only thing that mattered. Soft hands were bolder now in the darkness of the familiar room with all of the lies and prejudices laid out before them, a barren landscape for their would be love to wither or flourish.

He traced the contours of Holmes face in lips and fingertips, delicate and engulfing, half caring and half unquenched need while hands carefully freed him of the constrains of his final layers of clothing. Watson rolled off of the other man, kicking off his trousers, wanting to pin him back in place, to let him feel his desire without seeing it, to forget that the differences between them cause Holmes so much pain.

Slender arms pushed him back into the bed, slim legs straddling his thighs just below a thick explosion of scar tissue on which his hand subconsciously lay. He lay still, wanting to pull Holmes down to him, all too aware of how youthful his companion looked, how his beauty seemed beyond the touch of time while his own scarred body seemed to wither, his own arousal betraying his embarrassing need, almost grotesque next to the flat clean planes of the body above him.

Neither of them spoke as iridescent hands callused with the strings of violins and the grasp of a pipe pushed away the hands he used to hide himself, as they traced the path of his history scarred into his flesh. A breath caught painfully in his chest at the first touch against his organ, stroking across the length as if examining a clue, finally lifting it and caressing it, holding it in his warm palm.

Holmes smiled as his fingers trailed down, gently lifting his testicles, absorbing the warmth there before fisting him briefly, leaving his open palm at the tip, testing the skin he found there, fingering the vein running beneath the length. He bent his long body over him, kissing him so that Watson could feel his smile in the darkness, feel the hand close over him again as their bodies pressed against each other.

"Soft as I am." He whispered, wonder infusing his voice, lost in his own world, speaking to no one but letting the words pour from his lips.

Watsons chest arched as the hand pulled his willing flesh, gasping into the other mans smile.

It had never been like this. Like a touch could be enough to steal his soul.

Holmes turned them over; holding Watson close as he moved to his own back, pulling the other mans weight on top of him, holding him so close that he could feel the heat and weight of his member as if it were his own arousal pressing into his stomach. His body thrummed with blood, the cruel nub of flesh between his legs throbbed with need, a desire without comparison gripping his body, crippling his mind. A need more mental than physical when Watson gasped his name with breathless reverence and a face created to be in love looked down on him.

"Now." He let his hand run down his back, skimming to hold onto his flanks, to hold in his hands globes of muscled flesh. To pull Watson into him as he opened his legs further, to splay himself beneath the other. "John please."

A small helpless thrust rocked between their bodies, Watson rocking against the stub of engorged flesh until they both bit back a cry. His hands wandered across the bedspread desperately as hips rose to meet his thrusts, finding the jar loosened and abandoned next to the rise and fall of their bodies. It took an eternity of seconds to muster the dexterity to slick his fingers but only a heartbeat to run his fingers between their bodies, slicking both of them until the slide of their bodies was effortless.

Still slick fingers ran down scars, into secret dark havens and the warmth of embracing flesh. Watson expected a gasp, a tightening of muscles as he penetrated up to his knuckle inside of him. He did not expect the instantaneous acceptance, the way his body opened to him, for a soft moan to break the rhythm of their panting breaths. For the intimacy of his first name to be what was moaned into his ear.

Hips rose and fell, still sliding against each other but now as he fell Holmes impaled himself deeper onto his fingers, never slowing as one finger was joined by two, his gasps and moans the only acknowledgment of the way Watson moved his fingers inside of him, stretching his passage, moving held within the depths of his body. No more strange than if they were made of one body moving fluidly together.

Three fingers buried within him had Watson pressing his hip down to still him, sweat breaking out across his pallid chest as the fingers within him moved, twisting and opening relentless as the ocean.

He wanted more. To push him open, to take the body so completely given into his care and make him writhe. To make him scream. To leave an imprint of his touch seared into his flesh. He wanted to touch him in a way that would make him forget doubt, to flood him with sensation until it erased the memory of blades and blood with the blunt push of his fingertips. To leave part of himself deep within his almost willing lover.

"There is a place within you." Watson gasped as Sherlock's hips rose against his own arousal only to impale himself on John's hand, deep, engulfing. "A bundle of nerves left intact." His fingers twisted and Holmes strained to pull off, to push further, but Watson pinned him in place with a sweaty hand as his other worked deep inside of him. "A place they could not take from you."

He bent his fingers, searching, twisting, owning at last, claiming with deft fingers and Holmes screamed, his body arching. The sound was rough and stolen from his throat, his hips pushing convulsively down onto Watsons hand unable to control himself, hands clutching at the fabric of the bed as the fingers twisted within him, pushing again and wringing a cry from his body. His touch tearing him apart.

Watson pulled his hand free of his body, need flaring in his loins as Holmes pressed down against retreating fingers, as red swollen lips gapped panting and grey eyes bore into him as if looking into his soul.

"John." White hands grasped his shoulders, fingers kneading into the muscles, sweat slicking their touch. Under his gaze Holmes bent his knees, long legs folding nearly against his chest, spread to fall on either side of Watsons body, ankles coming to rest in the small of his back, embracing him.

He fell into place without thought or effort, their bodies aligning perfectly, his weeping arousal nudging prefect flesh, pressing against the opening of his body. He wanted to push in and bury himself within Holmes, wanted to watch his face fall open, to tear down the walls that lay between them, to strip away the remnants of society that lay on his face and render him perfectly naked. But pain wrenched at his heart at the desperation painted across sharp features.

Holmes' legs strained against him, pulling him closer, pulling him into his body. Pale hips rose, pushing back on his length until he could feel the muscle give way, heat engulfing the tip of his member. Watson spread his hand over Holmes' flat belly, pushing him down, off of him, before he could lose himself, pinning him in place against the coverlet.

He could taste the words as if they were his own, they writ themselves in his heart, etched in flesh and blood as surely as a bullet.

As clear as if Holmes had pulled him down and whispered the words into his ear.

_Do it now before I lose you._

The pain in his chest, the hand clenching around his heart, like a bullet splitting muscle, like watching love die, strangled his voice, tore him apart as he bent to press his mouth to Holmes, to kiss the words into his mouth.

"You are a fool if you believe that I could touch you-" He closed his eyes, their eyelashes brushing, the world warmed with their mingled breath, the skin under his possessive hand quivered "and ever let you go."

He thrust in deep and slow, Holmes opening for him, the muscles of his stomach tensing under his palm, engulfing every inch of him as their bodies slid together, until he was buried completely within him for the first time.

Their kiss froze, abandoned as Holmes was filled and he adjusted to the feeling, as their mouths could gape only for breath. He was wet, virgin, heat, perfection made physical. Watson waited until Holmes began panting against him, not speaking but his hips moved in hopeless circles, pushing, grinding into him from where he lay pinned.

Watson pulled out of his lovers' body, watching Holmes writhe beneath him, watch him try to strangle the sounds escaping his steel resolve, watch the normally impassive face flushed with desire and passionate need, watched as his body tore him apart. When only the crown of him remained buried within him he stole a kiss as the lithe body beneath him strained to feel him once again, pushing against him. His lips were wet and sucking on his neck, biting at the lobe of his ear as pushed in a scant two inches before pulling out again, building need, and satisfying nothing.

"John!" Hands grasped the back of his neck, wide desperate eyes looking into him, imploring him, begging him for more. Tears threatened to spill as the feeling of over panic and overwhelming passion flooded his body

Watson had set a fire in him. The pleasure was building to alarming levels, his passage felt slick and open, abandoned as he pulled out completely.

It was like dying, like being torn open and a void filled as John pushed deep within him, slick passage holding him, pulling him deeper until it felt as if every inch of his being was being invalided, filled with him. Splaying him open and stealing every secret, every part of him dark and hidden and laid out for him to touch and hold. Flesh met flesh, the heavy swing of his testicles pressing to soft flesh, their weight and softness strange and wonderful, like nothing he had ever known.

Watson's breath was on his face, panting into his neck as teeth and lips marked him, claiming him over and over as his own. Blood pooling under skin marking where he had belonged to Watson, a moment of passionate obsession frozen in time. His hips moved and deep within him his engorged member twisted against new flesh, pressing impossibly deeper. Hands on his hips lifted his body to change the angle of Watsons thrusts, his hips cantered off the bed like a wanton whore, his legs splayed.

It was almost enough to send panic shooting down his spine, too open, too vulnerable. When Watson thrust mercilessly back into him, his most intimate organ plunging into his body, thrusting to where fingers had made him writhe and scream.

Physical overriding the mental.

A surprised mewl the only thing to escape his lips as his need replaced panic in a rush of heat. He let large hands hold him up, let Watson pull out and drive back into him, filling him.

John entered him, heat infusing their bodies, every breath pushing his member into that bundle of nerves, making his legs shake, each little thrust a flash of white in his mind pushing him closer to oblivion. Watson laid his body on top of him, heavy and real, until their lips could meet.

Watson plundered his mouth sloppily, unable to concentrate as their bodies pushed helplessly against one another. He left a trail of wet heat in his wake even as he thrust between his legs. He kissed a trail of fire to his ear, lips still teasing, tongue working an evil magic.

Holmes felt his entire body stiffen in panic as he withdrew, his body hollowed and empty without him now, a lacking he never known he had, a deep need to be filled pushing his hips desperately against Watson. The pleasure was still building, impossible to reach the pinnacle, as if this torturous pleasure would last forever, driving him mad, fear pricking his mind. A hand dipped between their bodies, a slick palm rubbing the thick nub of flesh between his legs, pulling his hips into a helpless grinding circle.

"John please!"

He couldn't see his face, could not look into his eyes, but his body was flushed and hard on top of him, still desiring him. Tanned skin glowing with life, sparking new desperation in him.

He gasped, his mouth left open and panting as a voice heady with desire, roughened with passion vowed with the magnitude of a wedding vow and the sincerity of the lost. "I love you."

His hard member was nudging against his slick opening again, teasing, promising, holding back, his hand still rubbing his scarred flesh, igniting nerves that never should have woken.

There was a gasp in his ear, a sound ripped from the depth of Watsons very being, a breath that sounded like 'love'.

Watson thrust deep and harsh, rubbing against his prostate, obliterating his mind as he stayed buried within him, not pulling out but pressing desperate circles into his body making it hard to breathe without gasping and begging mindlessly for more or to finish him or make this last forever.

Like Watson never wanted to be outside of him again.

Watson's warm hands left his body, muscled arms moving to hold himself up on the bed, bodies still joined, groins and stomachs pressed close as blue eyes became visible once more, open and deep and beautiful in a way nothing else had ever been before. Red lips panting and filled with blood from kissing him formed words written in the lines of his face.

"I'm yours."

Watson held him as the building pleasure crested at the sound of his voice, crying out in the other mans ear, desperate to keep his eyes open and watch Watsons face as he lost his precarious hold on his body spent himself deep with Holmes. They held each other as the world ceased to move and then started again, through the lights and brilliance and tremors that affected every iota of his body, until the chemicals saturated his brain and brought him to the pinnacle of euphoria in which he could almost imagine staying in John's arms forever. Until he could almost believe this was real and the end would not come with the morning sun.

Strong hands lingered on his face and body, caressing and finally turning him so that they shared a pillow, bodies partially entwined, limbs left where they fell and pressing into each others bodies as if there was no difference between the two.

They stared into each other's eyes, their breaths mingling, a comforting expanse of white pillow cradling their heads, diminishing their worlds until only the other existed. Holmes could see the hint of a smile gracing his partner's lips, that smile which had too often of late been lost to him. A smile of perfect happiness.

A single steady hand traced the contours of his face, not as if he were memorizing, but as if he could not help himself. Fingertips danced across the dip of his cheek, a thumb brushed over his lips as if he wanted to steal a kiss. But the hand only drifted lower, fingers splayed and palm pressed possessively over his chest, over his heart.

Watson's eyes shone in the gentle blue light of the oncoming night. He took a deep breath, the way he does before reading his newest story aloud, because he knows that despite protests Holmes would do anything to hear it.

"Ever since our beginning and I made lists of your peculiarities I knew that I would spend all of our days together with you as the expert, but years have passed and now I know one thing absolutely which you would never guess."

His smile grew, soft and gentle, a smile which welcomed him in, a smile which was enough to keep his breathing shallow and his heart beat irregular even when he knew he should shut his eyes and turn away, even though he knew this man could break him apart.

"At first you will act as if nothing has changed and for awhile it will even feel as if this is true. You will accept my every kiss with a resolved pain. You will believe that every embrace will be our last and every kiss you will treat as our final goodbye. You will look at the future I predict now and you will think of how foolish and romantic I am, how naïve. This period will span days, time I will not waste. I will kiss you in the privacy of our rooms and hold you in my arms. When we go out to the theater, to dinner, or even out on a case you will look at me and know the words I am thinking even if I cannot say them. Because the first thing you hear when you wake will be that I love you and it will be the last thing you hear as you go to sleep at night.

Then, one day, you will wake and all of the details which once meant nothing will impress themselves on you. You will know when I touch you that to me you are perfect. When you speak I will hang on your every word, when you hold me I will count myself as undeserving of the great luck which has befallen me. But most importantly, when you are flawed, when you are cruel or throw yourself into danger, you will realize that this will never change between us. I will still be annoyed and worried, and I will still love you.

It may take the passage of weeks, months or even years but you will find yourself trusting me, we will grow inexplicably closer, and you will begin believe in us. My stories in the Strand will be more flawed and romantic than ever. You will take on more clients, more brilliant adventures, clients who will invite us to dinners and parties, and requests for our company will be, regretfully, denied. The end of the day will finds us hidden away together in our home and for the first time you will look forward to tomorrow.

Objects will come to possess new meaning to us. The chair on which we first kissed, the room in which we spent our first anniversary, the rug on which I knelt to ask you to spend the rest of your life with me, the rug we will have not moved from for the whole of the evening afterward.

We will go away for a year or two. Travel places neither of us have been or perhaps to places we once knew. On paper, courtesy I imagine of your brother, I will have met a girl whom I wooed and married.

By the time we return to Baker Street she will have tragically died and left me a widow with only you to care for me.

If people ask you will say that I visited often, that we were unbelievably happy, that when I officially moved away you barely noticed my absence until the day you went to collect me and take me home.

We will invite friends to Sunday dinner, ones that linger after for a drink and a cigarette just to hear the end of our most recent escapade, to hear your theory of this or that.

Years will pass, maybe this night will have faded from your memory entirely, although I doubt it. We will remember our days together as fondly as a dream, a life spent as well as any other in the history of the world.

We will age, our bodies will deteriorate and those around us will suffer similar fates. Some will age gracefully; the lines on our faces will speak of a life spent in laughter and joy. Lestrade will be bald. The irregulars will grow up, they will visit with stories of wives and babies and a life that was better for you having been in it.

One day years from now we will be on holiday, in Switzerland or France. I will be rushing off on an errand, off my usual path but well within the realm of normalcy because with you no part of the world is out of reach, and you will see me. At first you will smile, a familiar face set against fantastical backgrounds, you might nod at me and contemplate running to finish your own errand but you will condemn the thought a moment later. Your smile when our hands grasp tight will be genuine and unafraid. You will not say a word. And in that place where no one knows our names, under the roar of a waterfall, or standing on top of the world, you will kiss me.

Alone in the darkness of our room that night, trapped in each other's arms, you will whisper that you believe in us, words I have heard a million times, and each kiss will be like the first.

We will age and we will grow old and we will watch the world change around us and I would not change a second of the life I spent with you.

Though the days will change and the adventures differ there are two things I know beyond a doubt which will always happen.

When you wake up in the morning the first thing you know will be that I love you.

And it will be the last thing you hear when you go to sleep at night.


End file.
